Asylum Suitcases, Found And Photographed - From NPR

"Photographer Jon Crispin has a fascination with things that are left behind. In the '80s he was basically given free rein to document abandoned asylums in New York state. Crispin's latest fascination is with old suitcases — discovered by the New York State Museum in an attic of the Willard Psychiatric Center in Willard, N.Y."

"The cases were put into storage when their owners were admitted to Willard sometime between 1910 and the 1960s," Crispin explains on a Kickstarter page, where he is raising funds to continue photographing. "And since the facility was set up to help people with chronic mental illness, these folks never left."

"I try to make them look as beautiful as they are," he says. "And they're touching too. My goal as a photographer is to have people react." The suitcases contain letters that were never mailed, diaphanous cigarette papers, a glass bottle of glycerin left behind by a craftswoman — tiny parts of a forgotten whole."

See more photos here (Link)

Point of View

Anyone who has ever been around an infant or toddler knows how they study and take in the smallest things. They are interested in how everything tastes, feels, sounds, and looks. As you get older, I think you get a little jaded to the amount you take in during the course of the day.

Kids have the luxury of investigating every new sight, sound, taste, and texture - they don't have to tune out extraneous sensory input to accomplish a goal - they don't ignore the caffeine jitters, 24 hour news, loud music, or the smells and sounds of dense traffic. The obstacle is the path.

I started taking these photos one Sunday afternoon just to get an appreciation of what things must look like from my son's perspective - what does he see when we sit him on our laps at the table, or when he holds on to the dishwasher rack and tries to pull out all of the spoons, or when he's sitting in his swing looking at the birdhouse? What does he see when we put him in his child seat that faces the back window? I set up a tripod to his height, attached a 50mm lens and got a view of thing he sees or plays with on a daily basis.

The Pen is Mightier

"I'm the same as I was when I was six years old..."

Vivian Maier was a nanny who lived in Chicago for most of her life and passed away in 2009 at the age of 83. Little more is known about her, except that she was an avid street photographer. Her work was discovered at an auction in 2007, more than 100,000 negatives and undeveloped rolls of film, sold by a storage facility who were cleaning out her locker for delinquent rent.



Click here for links to more of her work.


"On a plane, I can see all the lights below, and oh my god they they look so alone. I don't really feel anything."

"your heart felt good, it was dripping pitch and made of wood."

"Liz Lemon, I think girls be trying to impress other girls with all them weird ass lip colors."

What burns never returns. Except when you're daydreaming.

Things that unfortunately, you don't hear at the DMV or the Walgreens passport station:

"I didn't like that one. Lets try it again."

"For $14.99, you can have the 'Laser,' background."

Had a brief and entertaining Tactical Medicine lecture this morning. There are some significant differences in how you treat trauma victims in civilian life and on the battlefield. Definitely less to remember:


Civilian life:

A-Airway
B-Breathing
C-Circulation
D-Disability
E-Exposure
F-F.A.S.T. exam


Military:

R-Return Fire
T-Tourniquet


All kidding aside, there are actually pretty good statistics backing this methodology up gleaned from studies of the Vietnam war. Focusing on reversible causes of mortality with very limited time and resources - exanguination is far and away the leading treatable cause of mortality in the battlefield, with pneumothorax/hemothorax trailing a distant second.

Comixed

Assasinations and Bombings in the Pelican State

The hospital I work at in Baton Rouge is named after the younger brother of famed politician and former governor Huey P. Long - "The Kingfish."

Huey Long was a tyrant, probably manic, a heavy drinker, he ruined the lives of many of his competitors through political subversion, he was adored by the underprivileged and minorities in Louisiana, and he built the beautiful state capitol building here and Baton Rouge. He was shot inside of it, just after getting off of his personal elevator, and bullet holes still scar the marble walls 75 years later.




Long was allegedly shot inside of his new building by physician Carl Weiss, M.D. Dr. Weiss was the son of a judge in Opelousas whom Long despised. Long had been unable to unseat the judge, so he introduced a bill to divide up voting districts in his area to force him out of office.

Statue of the Kingfish, facing the state capitol.

According to some theories, Dr. Weiss a well respected physician, confronted the governor who was with his heavily armed entourage. There is a debate as to whether Weiss had a weapon, or simply punched the governor in the mouth as he exited his elevator. What ever the case - Dr. Weiss was shot 32 times in the hallway of the capitol, and the governor died in a local hospital 2 days later from a gunshot wound that may have been ricochet from his own guards.

Dr. Weiss' body lying in the capitol hallway after the assassination.

I was prompted to write this, and to post pictures from my visit to the capitol by an NPR special for the 75th anniversary of Huey Long's death. At the state capital next weekend, Dr. Weiss' son (now himself a surgeon) will be speaking publicly for the first time on the event. After the assassination, his mother was mistreated by the local community in Baton Rouge, and they were forced to move to France, where he grew up. There will also be a play, based on the assassination, in which members of the audience will be chosen as jurors. The jurors will decide the final scene, whether Dr. Weiss indeed murdered Governor Long, or if the Kingfish was inadvertently killed by his own men.

Another interesting bit of history that is not readily apparent to all visitors of the state capitol is the evidence of a bomb blast that shook the state senate chamber in the 1970's. Luckily the bomb, hidden under the front podium, exploded at the wrong time when the senate was out of session. Shards of wood are still embedded in the plaster and in the ceiling, and the marble columns are fractured behind the speaker's podium.

Wood shard embedded in the column.

Fissure in the marble column behind the speaker's podium.
Small wood shard embedded in the ceiling.

"My walk has become rather sillier lately."

Everyone has encountered these types of steps at some point in their lives. They are too wide to take just one foot per step, but just too narrow to take two full strides - so inevitably you end up taking a full stride to advance, and a half step just to position yourself to go up to the next level. To bystanders I likely look like a 4 year old, or a retarded cat.