There were three carloads of them, disembarking on North Clearfield. All of them were drunk, some of them were high, and one or two were carrying weapons in the form of small appliances. Gerry Vessels took the lead, leather duster swinging open. He made a left turn onto Frankford, came to a halt outside of Chuckle’s.

“You know you ain’t allowed,” the owner shouted. He was seated on a barstool just beyond the rust-brown entrance. The owner leaned forward, took a headcount of the sidewalk. He pushed his stool into the shadows, slammed the door without a warning. Gerry Vessels kicked the door wide, blitzkrieged his way onto the pool room. A battle cry rang out and patrons bottlenecked the entrance. Someone took a swing at Gerry, tagged him square across the jaw.

There was a rumble out on Frankford – flesh pounding, cotton tearing. A friend of Gerry’s was unloading on some asshole near the ground. That friend – a six-foot Kenzo named Chris Shanahan – had just tucked in both arms when someone stabbed him from behind. The blade entered near his kidney, splitting up and through a pair of ribs. It plunged in deeper near the tricep, cutting clear across the bone.

There was a scream and then a whistle, followed by the sound of bootheels clapping. Gerry Vessels fought his way clear, hurried east toward the corner. There was a car there waiting for him. He grabbed the handle, hopped inside. Continue reading →

“The function of all the granular details in background and in setting is to suggest this corruption at the root of the world, this poisoned garden. And what it suggests is that the world itself is poison and there’s something ruinous at work here. And the poison at the root of the world is humanity, which is also its only vehicle for meaning. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg type thing. The world is a reflection of who we are, and our values, and our concerns. However we’re all born into situations we didn’t create, inheritors of situations we didn’t create, we’re also subject to these things. In some ways I go back to the first story I ever heard, [which was] a noir story called The Book of Genesis. If you think about it, there’s sex, there’s palace intrigue, there’s sexual betrayal, there’s vengeance, and then there’s two brothers, and one of them kills the other one, and this is in the first two pages. So it’s always been suggested in our oldest literature that we’re living after some kind of spiritual or metaphysical fall.”

(Excerpted from “To The Best of Our Knowledge” radio interview.)

Catch a wave. I’ll see you when it’s over.

Flash, long believed to represent the bane of street photography, became an integral part of Mark Cohen’s approach throughout the 1970s. Cohen reimagined flash as a means by which to elicit a reaction. Provocation was the goal, or – at the very least – a byproduct. In that spirit, Cohen would wander the streets of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, invading people’s personal space just prior to shining a flash bulb in their eyes. The results represent a strange, frenetic alchemy, 1,000x more relevant given the state of citizen photography. Critics maintain Cohen straddles the line between commentary and perversion, citing images that tend to exploit young children in a manner that can only be described as sexual. And yet, it is precisely this uncertain area which renders Cohen’s work an ongoing topic for discussion. In the age of Instagram and Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter, the mainstream sexualization of minors hasn’t only become commonplace, it’s uncharacteristically rewarded.

(Mark Cohen continues at the Danziger Gallery through 6/20, free, 527 West 23rd Street.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• European Trip: Photographs From The Car, 1968 by Joel Meyerowitz @ Howard Greenberg Gallery (Free, through 5/31, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406)
• The Studio Recreated by Ultra Violet @ Dillon Gallery (Free, through 6/3, 555 West 25th Street)
• Holy Terror: Photographs From Inside Warhol’s World by Bob ColaCello @ Steven Kasher Gallery (Free, through 5/4, 521 West 23rd Street)
• Beyond Fashion by Charles James @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free, through 8/10, 5th Avenue @ 83rd Street)
• they thought I were but I aren’t anymore … by Larry Clark @ Luhring Augustine (Free, 6/7 through 8/1, 531 West 24th Street)

The most effective pre-publicity IFC could have employed prior to releasing Cold In July would have been to stream the first five minutes of the film via internet. I mention this because the first five minutes of Cold In July are absolutely riveting, a master class in tension, exceptionally conceived, shot and executed. Unfortunately, those first five minutes serve as a lead-in to the movie, which unravels like a ball of yarn. 

The problem with Cold In July isn’t the acting, and isn’t the directing. The problem with Cold In July is a screenplay so damn earnest it puts most Grisham novels to shame. The character choices are unlikely, the camaraderie is absurd, and the climax introduces more questions than it provides in terms of answers. Somewhere in between Michael C. Hall goes full-on drawl beneath a mullet and Sam Shepard makes his presence felt in spades. Don Johnson’s character comes on far too big for any actor’s britches and Vinessa Shaw seems out of place as the down-home Texas bride. What the entire thing adds up to is one unfortunate mess of a movie. But the first five minutes will hold you fast onto your seat. You can bet the goddamn house on that.

(Cold In July opens in limited release this Friday.)

Native – or even transplanted – New Yorkers will often refer to a specific emotion they experience upon reentering the city after an intermittent time away. There are variations on this theme, yet the majority of them center upon one moment, emerging from the steps outside Penn Station, the soft white lights from Times Square somehow illuminating high-rise windows more than a half-mile down the road. There is safety here, a sudden warmth, the embrace of something both ethereal and palpable … the smell of vendors, the fast-vanishing horns, more layers of white noise than early man could imagine.

While I do not arrive by train on this particular evening, the maudlin calm remains the same. After 15 days out on the road, my legs have grown tight and both palms have grown calluses. My apartment here is smaller than most hotel rooms where I’ve stayed. Yet as I return to it tonight I feel an overwhelming sense of joy. I am home now, free and clear. Tomorrow will offer new stories to be told.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

I empty all my change into a meter less than three blocks from the Capitol, then follow Pennsylvania as it spans the White House lawn. The Lincoln Monument’s a mob scene with dueling preachers on both pillars and the yuppies play flag football on the north side of the mall. I swing out wide along the war memorials before doubling back toward the car. The Washington Monument remains closed. It’s been that way for 15 years.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Those eyes, those eyes … Marion Cotillard can beat the world back with those eyes. And she does throughout The Immigrant, a rich and gorgeous period picture that is equally well-realized and well-acted. Set in 1920s New York City, James Gray’s motion picture shares both the palette and the pace of The Godfather, Part II (particularly the young Vito Corleone segments). The set up is similar – a fleeing immigrant escapes to America where she is left to make it on her own – and the two films maintain a similar stance on how American culture praises money most of all. But the broad-stroke similarities end there. Jeremy Renner, Joaquin Phoenix … all the major players are superb. But in the end it all comes back to Marion Cotillard, and the way she beats the world back with those eyes – a French actress playing a Polish refugee living in a Russo-Jewish neighborhood in post-war New York City. How’s that for an American dream?

(The Immigrant opens in limited release today.)

I am not a fan of guided tours, nor the guided tourists who tour them. Too many questions, too much historical bedwetting, too many guests determined to lead the tour themselves. Along those lines, visitors to Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana can be seen posing for selfies in the slave quarters, dribbling ice cream down their T-shirts, paying $20-a-head to greet employees dressed in period garb, beset on all four sides by the massive weight that pulled these oak trees down.

I spend an hour at Oak Alley before heading north on 55 to Jackson, where I visit the one-time home of Medgar Evers. A civil rights activist, Evers was gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith lived free for another 30 years before being convicted of Evers’ murder in February of 1994.

Upon arrival in Memphis the following day I visit the hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The facade of the Lorraine has been preserved, yet I find an anemic lack of tourists idly wandering the vicinity. The lion’s share have already departed on a chartered bus to Graceland, where they’ll fork over $34-a-head to roam the castle of another King, one who crossed the racial barrier before descending into sloth.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Heading east from Santa Monica, none of the locals has any idea how one might find Route 66. “The real Route 66?” a gas station attendant replies, defiantly. “Oh, man, I’ve no idea.” I am standing in a service plaza that is actually named Route 66, approximately half-a-day’s drive east of a zero-mile marker for the original road. As I continue into Arizona, I become all but convinced the 90-year old highway’s current existence is little more than urban legend, an inside joke among the yokels, if you will. GPS is useless and my atlas offers no additional guidance whatsoever. That is until the markers begin to take hold – “Route 66,” they read in stencil, “Please follow exit Y or Z“. For the better part of an afternoon, I weave in and out of decommissioned highway, a petrol graveyard full of septic tanks and crumbling marquees. The late-day sun glares bright and hard, throwing blood onto horizon. I am speeding through north Texas, prepared to jackknife down to New Orleans.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index