Gallery 35

View of Lower Manhattan from Exchange Place, New Jersey, by Camilo Jose Vergara.

PBS and Slate have more of Vergara's photos of the Twin Towers, here and here.

Me and Philip

My friend Brad sent me this e-mail today, which I found highly entertaining, so I thought I would share:

If you went to the state fair and got a caricature drawn of you, and the artist working the booth was Diego Velazquez, I think the resulting portrait might look something like any of his portraits of King Philip IV.

Remember, I did say caricature. I do mean that he kind of looks to me like a comic impression of you, not you. He painted this dude a lot. Must’ve been a bigshot in Velazquez’s day. There are a lot of him when he was older that don’t look as much like you. Also, this is just a portrait. The “action” paintings are always of him hunting or riding a horse or owning a valuable dog — all things that I don’t really associate with you. But every time I see a Velazquez painting of Philip IV, I always think — there goes Diego painting Johnny again.

Hopefully this does not offend you. If you have to have an artist obsessed with your likeness, you can do a lot worse than Diego Velazquez...