“Tin Man” by Future Islands
“Baby Says” by The Kills
“Ballad of Spider John” by Willis Alan Ramsey

El Diablo – Applescal from Amos Mulder on Vimeo.

And it’s a climbing movie as a heads up…Filmed by Corey Richards, one of a three-person team comprised of Richards, Simone Moro, and Denis Urubko on their ascent of Gasherbrum II (summited February 2, 2011). Directed and well-edited by Anson Fogel. Rock and Ice says, “a winter ascent of an 8000-meter peak has never been completed in the Karakorum.”

COLD – TRAILER from Anson Fogel on Vimeo.

The photos are up! At least some of them. Stories will either have to wait or be told. Time for bed.

Today, I stumbled across a video interview with the Ireland-born Brooklyn artist himself and am now quite motivated to find more of his work.

Here is an interesting video and interview with photographer, Donald Weber, who has shot Chernobyl and recently Fukushima with a particularly acute eye for the story and atmosphere of an exclusion zone. Like he says, there’s no fixing a nuclear disaster…

To ______,

My wife ______ shared with me her e-mail correspondence with you regarding our concerns about our daughter’s recruitment into Young Life through the efforts of a volunteer at Eckstein.

After our daughter attended several meetings, my wife and I did some research into Young Life and talked with a family member who spent several years in the Young Life program. We are sufficiently alarmed by what we have found that we are not supporting our daughter’s continued participation and are further concerned that the school seems to endorse these efforts to promote what is basically a fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

Young Life volunteers like ______ are called “campaigners” their express purpose in working in middle schools and high schools is to recruit students to attend Young Life “Clubs”. They are instructed on strategies regarding which students to target and the purpose of the recruitment is to lead the new members to proclaim Jesus as their lord and savior. The mission is not one of faith through service, but is explicitly an evangelical mission of conversion to the Young Life-endorsed version of Christianity.

This is no different than inviting Jehovah’s Witnesses into the school, or a radical Imam for that matter. This is an organization that encourages its young followers to “rebuke” their own parents or outside friends if they are not willing to share the conversion experience. This exclusion extends to other Christian denominations which are not deemed sufficiently devout. This pressure is brought to bear gradually as students are brought deeper into the Young Life experience through their participation in week long camps. Their conversion experiences qualify them as campaigners like ______ and they are in turn sent out into their community schools to recruit the next round of students.

Please do some research about Young Life before so readily endorsing the “positive role model” they offer. I encourage you to do more than talk with ______ about her mission though it would be interesting to see if she would be candid about what her objectives are in “volunteering” at Eckstein.

Frankly if I wanted my daughter to be indoctrinated in a specific religious system, I would be sending her to a religious school not what I thought was a secular one.

Thank you for your attention,

—the father