Blog
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Sink Event at The Durham Hotel Feb. 28
THIS UPCOMING EVENT means a lot to me. I’ll be back in town to speak to the MFA students at the Center for Documentary Studies, where I was based for fifteen years and where I did much of my Smith and Jazz Loft work. The event also features writer Allan Gurganus, to whom Gene Smith’s Sink…
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Interview on Outspoken Podcast from Cal. St. Fullerton
Usually I’m on the interviewing side of oral history work. HERE I’m receiving questions from Ben Cawthra of Cal. St. Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History, where I gave the annual Hansen Lecture in Fall 2017. In a good oral history interview, not intended for broadcast but for posterity, the questions are deeper than…
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My Best of 2017
2017 was epochal and challenging for most, including me. It was the first time I’ve had an automobile license plate not issued in North Carolina. Our toddler started bilingual day care, which he (and we) loved for five months before it almost disappeared overnight, saved by my wife and her colleagues on an urgent parent…
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Jem Cohen’s film “Chuck-will’s-widow”
There’s not much that could make me feel better about Gene Smith’s Sink than Jem Cohen’s short film based on it, “Chuck-will’s-widow,” and his words to introduce the film’s online premiere last week at The Paris Review Daily. The film premiered on screen at National Sawdust in Brooklyn in October. Jem’s work has influenced me for almost as…
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Gene Smith’s Sink in December Harper’s
All involved in Gene Smith’s Sink figured it would be a slow burn. 2017 isn’t the ideal year for a spare, quiet, “strange” (Luc Sante) and “unorthodox” (Nate Chinen) book incommensurate in page numbers (206) with the years of work (20) that made it possible. So we’re not surprised it took three months to get a deep…
