The Wrong Empire

New Delta terminal (at JFK)

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:52:22 -0400

New Delta terminal (at JFK)

MOMA garden - one of my favourite places in New York

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:18:34 -0400

MOMA garden - one of my favourite places in New York

"The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:21:32 -0400

“The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen.”

- Saul Bellow - Herzog, Penguin Books, New York, 1964

(via lightthroughrain)

Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have spiked since the revelations of the US government’s access to...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:41:10 -0400

Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have spiked since the revelations of the US government’s access to everyone’s electronic communications but John Le Carre’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, is equally prescient as he rails against the privatization of the British intelligence services:

Private defence contractors. Where’ve you been ? Name of the game these days. War’s gone corporate, in case you haven’t noticed.

However in Le Carre’s book it is Toby, a British civil servant, who is fighting to reveal information about Ethical Outcomes, a private US defence company:

which in turn led Toby into a rather inarticulate condemnation of the Deep State, and thence into a denunciation of the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.

Le Carre’s themes are echoed in the new Star Trek Into Darkness movie - a sentence I never thought I would write - as the military tries to take over the Enterprise’s scientific mission.

From Slate:

Admiral Marcus orders Kirk to fly to the edge of enemy space and execute Khan using a payload of classified, high-tech torpedoes that are capable of seeking out enemies from long distance. In other words, he orders an extrajudicial killing by drone strike. The fact that this measure isn’t strictly kosher under Starfleet law worries Spock, who reminds Kirk of Khan’s right to due process, noting that there is no Starfleet regulation that allows the killing of a Federation resident without a trial.

Unfortunately in real life, the differences between heroes and villains is not quite as obvious.

Sliver of sunlight

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:25:26 -0400

Sliver of sunlight

"Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the..."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:03:59 -0400

“Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer believes that technology is making us more detached. Pair with The New Yorker’s essay on netiquette. (via millionsmillions)

"If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will..."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:41:41 -0400

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

- David Foster Wallace (via explore-blog)

How to move big pieces of furniture into a brownstone (at...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:37:22 -0400

How to move big pieces of furniture into a brownstone (at Harlem, NY)

Dramatic sky over Manhattan tonight

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:06:54 -0400

Dramatic sky over Manhattan tonight

Red jacket amongst Ellsworth Kelly’s Chatham Series (at...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:13:25 -0400

Red jacket amongst Ellsworth Kelly’s Chatham Series (at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA))

In a window (at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA))

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:07:12 -0400

In a window (at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA))

"Vicariously, through another person’s eyes, men and women can see the world anew …There is..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:26:19 -0400

“Vicariously, through another person’s eyes, men and women can see the world anew …There is given to them again a sense of wonder. This should be the photographer’s aim, for this is the purpose that pictures fulfill in the world as it is today … We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with ideas to stand and stare.”

- Bill Brandt : Shadow and Light Exhibition at MOMA

Window into a diner - reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting ...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:55:38 -0400

Window into a diner - reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting (at Court Square Diner)

Will miss classic American diners when I return to England (at...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:52:41 -0400

Will miss classic American diners when I return to England (at Court Square Diner)

FT Alphaville: Drunk Swiss bankers? (and the CIA)

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:55:47 -0400

FT Alphaville: Drunk Swiss bankers? (and the CIA):

He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was…

Tunnel between East and West wing (at National Gallery of Art)

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:11:39 -0400

Tunnel between East and West wing (at National Gallery of Art)

Alexander Calder in the lobby (at National Gallery of Art)

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:07:58 -0400

Alexander Calder in the lobby (at National Gallery of Art)

"I thought of my grandfather’s war. How they had destinations and purpose. How the next day we’d..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:29:35 -0400

“I thought of my grandfather’s war. How they had destinations and purpose. How the next day we’d march out under a sun hanging low over the plains in the east. We’d go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of a season. We’d drive them out. We always had. We’d kill them. They’d shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and the wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages. Then they’d come back, and we’d start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops. While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few years from now.”

- I re-read Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds after seeing a piece on military suicides at The Dish.

It is shocking that 22 veterans kill themselves on a daily basis but after reading the book I am surprised that the number is not higher.

The novel highlights the youth of the soldiers who are sent into battle by their elders - even the squad lieutenant is under 25 - and who are constantly surrounded by horrors that civilians safe at home do not even want to imagine:
Most of us had seen death in many forms: the slick mess after a suicide bomber, headless bodies gathered in a ditch like a collection of broken dolls on a child’s shelf, even our own boys sometimes, bleeding and crying as it became apparent that the sound of a casevac was thirty seconds too far in the distance.

While reading the book I learnt that Powers deservedly won the Oxfam Prize for Emerging Writers at this year’s Telegraph Hay Festival:

He had never had anything published when he went to war – his parents worked in a factory and the US Postal Service – but he had written poetry frequently and tried to jot down notes in a journal when he was in Iraq. There are turns of phrase in the book that one senses he could only have coined while on active duty, rather than recreated many years later.

His book should be required reading for all the talking heads and pundits who so glibly profess the need to send yet more young men and women to die in war.

Manhattan skyline from a Brooklyn roof deck

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 22:32:57 -0400

Manhattan skyline from a Brooklyn roof deck

josephdenne: Compelling, introspective double exposure...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:17:48 -0400

josephdenne:

Compelling, introspective double exposure portraiture

Aneta Ivanova’s long exposure shots provide a snapshot of the inner being. In the series, “Scars”, Ivanova imprints a landscape onto the subjects body; landscapes as wounds.

You can see more on Ivanova’s Behance.