from The New York Times

Steve Sabol, Cinematic Force for N.F.L., Dies at 69

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Steve Sabol, who was the creative force behind NFL Films, his father’s innovative enterprise that melded cinematic ingenuity, martial metaphors and symphonic music to lend professional football the aura of myth and help fuel its rise in popularity, died on Tuesday in Moorestown, N.J. He was 69.

In 1960, pro football was the nation’s fourth most popular spectator sport after baseball, college football and boxing. But over the next decade, it rocketed to first place in polls, television ratings and revenue, and NFL Films, begun in 1962, helped propel it. Sports Illustrated called the enterprise “perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America.”

Although his father, Ed, founded NFL Films, Steve Sabol — the producer, writer, director and cameraman — created the images and sounds it became famous for: a kicked football floating end-over-end or a pigskin bullet spiraling in slow motion; a row of bruised and dirtied gladiators hunkering on the sideline; the crunch of bodies brawling at the line of scrimmage or colliding in the open field.

And overlaying all of it was stirring orchestral music and, for many years, the ringing narration of John Facenda, a former television news anchor in Philadelphia whose rolling bass was called “the voice of God.”

[ click to read full article at NYTimes.com ]

from Museum Of The Moving Image

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from Smithsonian Magazine

The History of the Lunch Box

Sadly, the metal lunch box has mostly gone the way of the overhead projector. Today’s kids often tote their lunches in soft insulated polyester versions that fit easily into backpacks, just the latest development in the long and distinguished history of midday-meal transporting devices.

The seemingly inactive Whole Pop Magazine Online has an illustrated history of the lunch box—cutely named Paileontology—that traces the origins to the 19th century. Back then working men protected their lunches from the perils of the job site (just imagine what a coal mine or a quarry could do to a guy’s sandwich) with heavy-duty metal pails.

[ click to view more cool pails at Smithsonian’s Food & Think ]

from CNN

Turkish woman awaits trial after beheading her alleged rapist

From Talia Kayali, CNN

(CNN) — A woman in Turkey is awaiting trial after beheading a man who she says raped her repeatedly for months and is the father of her unborn child. Her lawyer says the woman killed the man to protect her honor.

Nevin Yildirim, a 26-year-old mother of two, lives in a small village in southwestern Turkey. She said the man, Nurettin Gider, began the attacks a few days after her husband left in January for a seasonal job in another town, according to a source close to the case.

Yildirim said Gider threatened her with a gun and said he would kill her children, ages 2 and 6, if she made any noise, according to the source. That was the first of repeated rapes over the next eight months, the source said.

She said she grabbed her father-in-law’s rifle that was hanging on the wall and she shot him. He tried to draw his gun and she fired again.

“I chased him,” she said. “He fell on the ground. He started cussing. I shot his sexual organ this time. He became quiet. I knew he was dead. I then cut his head off.”

Witnesses described Yildirim walking into the village square, carrying the man’s head by his hair, blood dripping on the ground.

“Don’t talk behind my back, don’t play with my honor,” Yildirim said to the men sitting in the coffee house on the square. “Here is the head of the man who played with my honor.”

[ click to read full article at CNN.com ]

from The New York Times

A History of New York in 50 Objects

By SAM ROBERTS

An artichoke and an elevator. A Checker taxicab and a conductor’s baton. A MetroCard and a mastodon tusk.

Inspired by “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” the British Museum’s BBC radio series and book, we recruited historians and museum curators to identify 50 objects that could embody the narrative of New York.

[ click to continue reading at The NY Times ]

from The LA Weekly

Campbell’s to Pay Homage to Warhol’s Soup Can Art at Target in September

By Andrew Simmons

In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can paintings were a spectacularly ordinary counterpoint to any number of lush, sophisticated still-lifes of bowls of laboriously arranged fruit. Warhol wasn’t about commentary. He was genuinely enamored of the commonplace and ubiquitous. And he actually did enjoy Campbell’s, having once claimed in an interview to have consumed a can for lunch every day for 20 years.

How fitting then that to commemorate the 50-year-anniversary of Warhol’s soup triumph, Campbell’s is releasing — for the month of September — limited edition soup cans inspired by Warhol’s creations.

[ click to continue reading at LAWeekly.com ]

from SPIN

Swans Leader M. Gira: Say No to Society, Record Labels, Touring With Your Spouse

by Kory Grow

“I don’t know how Kim and Thurston did it for so long.”

Over the past three decades, Michael Gira has established himself as underground rock’s ace of debasement. From the brutal, self-pugilistic caterwauls of sludgy art-rockers Swans to the brittle, American Gothic doom-folk he recorded with Angels of Light, he strips music down to its harrowing, bare-bones essentials. It’s no wonder, then, that his acidic bellowing and post-blues licks resound in the works of industro-rockers like Godflesh and heady metallers like Neurosis as much as experimental folk artists like James Blackshaw and Wooden Wand. Since 1990, he’s applied the same principles to running his home-brewed record label Young God, launching the careers of freaky folks like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family; running his business with a cutthroat, do-it-yourself attitude a good decade before the rest of the internet followed suit. He is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, so, we asked him to explain his outlook on life on the eve of the release of Swans’ 12th album, the relentless, cinematic, two-hour bludgeon The Seer

[ click to continue reading at SPIN ]

from The Chicago Sun-Times

Editorial: America should shoot for the stars again

The moment Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, he became slightly other­worldly in our eyes, cloaked in a golden aura that did not sit easily with his shy and private ways.

But Armstrong understood the power of that aura and used it, sparingly, over the years for a cause he believed in fully: human space exploration. One of his last high-profile public appearances, in 2010, was to testify before a Congressional committee against the Obama administration’s plan to redirect NASA’s efforts away from human exploration of space and toward more basic long-term science research.

That, Armstrong said, would be “devastating.”

NASA’s first priority, he said with a touch of the same poetry he brought to his first step on the moon, should be “learning to sail on this new ocean.”

[ click to continue reading at The Chicago Sun-Times ]

from Grantland

You Either Smoke or You Get Smoked

An oral history of White Men Can’t Jump

COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX

By Thomas Golianopoulos

White Men Can’t Jump begins with a 19-minute sequence that features a version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” by the Venice Beach Boys, more rat-a-tat “yo momma” jokes than a season’s worth of BET’s ComicView and, of course, some pickup basketball. Director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, Tin Cup) wanted to establish that his actors — a ragtag cast that included a burgeoning movie star, a fifth-lead sitcom actor, former NBA players, Division-I washouts, weekend warriors, and Kadeem Hardison in a goofy hat — really had game. So when the film’s stars, Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, step to the top of the key for a best-of-five shooting contest, Shelton doesn’t cut away to the basket. No camera tricks, no editing, no ringers. There was just one problem: His actors couldn’t stop chucking up bricks.

“We were looking at our watches like, ‘When are these guys gonna make one?'” says actor Ernest Harden Jr., who looked on during the six-hour shoot. One day on set, Harden uttered what became the film’s mantra: That word action is a motherfucker. “You could be prepared,” Harden says. “And then you hear ‘action’ and everything goes wrong.”

[ click to continue reading at Grantland ]