-
-
Steve Reich - America — Before the war
-
High Resolutionstories from the city | museum
-
Ayman Oghanna
MOSUL, Iraq — Until the past week, Samar Hassan had never glimpsed the photograph of her that millions had seen, never knew it had become one of the most famous images of the war.
The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties and has been one of the few images from this conflict to rise to the pantheon of classic war photography. The picture has gained renewed attention as part of a large body of work by Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer recently killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya.
Chris Hondros/Getty Images
(Source: The New York Times)
-
… They all are waiting the lucky day in which they will be able to catch the ferry; climbing to it, or hidden in the load of the trucks that the boat carries to Italy. And then… go further North in search for a job, a future, a safe and normal life. Crisis-hit Greece has become a nightmare for them. There is not the slightest possibility for work in a country with rocketing unemployment figures. Greeks don’t want them, neither they want to stay in Greece, but they are stuck here because European Union treaties allow third countries to return them to the state where they first entered the EU. And Greece has been the gate to Europe in the last years for 90 % of migrants.
Everything happened so quickly: a group of 4 or 5 locals drive their two cars to the old train station claiming that a migrant has stolen some money at the open air market this Saturday morning. They hit the first migrant they find, an old man cooking in an improvised fireplace. The locals try to do the same with other migrants, but the cries raise the alarm and more migrants appear from the old wagons with sticks and stones to expel the assailants. The locals go back to their cars, although one stops and punches another migrant in the face, just before getting in his black Renault Megane. The migrants try to stop the black Renault but the driver makes a U-turn knocking down a migrant, a 35-years old Algerian. He stops the car, its back aiming at us, and hits the gas at full speed in reverse gear. I jump on a small wall, as does the photographer Alessandro Penso and some migrants, to avoid being knocked down by the black car. Others run, but Nabi cannot beat the speed of the vehicle and gets hit. His body flies some meters away in front of our astonished eyes. The insane driver hits the gas and escapes leaving Nabi lying on the ground.
We all run to check his health. He has been badly hit, bleeding his face, but he is alive (later we will know that he got some bones broken). The police arrive and later the ambulance, considerably late since there is no ambulance driver working that day in Corinth (because of the austerity measures cuts) and has to come from a neighboring town.TEXT: ANDRÉS MOURENZA // PHOTO: ALESSANDRO PENSO
(Source: noticiasdesdegrecia.wordpress.com)
-
-
A smile and a must
photo: murplejane
“The two lovers are tied back-to-back
on a mule. The shot frames this image of the two bound lovers
going to their atrocious death; both seem enraptured, but devoid of
pathos: on their faces there is simply the hint of a smile, a kind of
withdrawal into the smile. The word ‘smile’ here is only an
approximation. Their faces reveal that the man and the woman exist
entirely in their love. But the film’s thought, embodied in the
infinitely nuanced black and white of the faces, has nothing to do
with the romantic idea of the fusion of love and death. These
‘crucified loves’ never desired to die. The shot says the very
opposite: love is what resists death.
At a conference held at the Fémis, Deleuze, quoting Malraux, once
said that art is what resists death. Well, in these magnificent shots,
Mizoguchi’s art not only resists death but leads us to think that love
too resists death. This creates a complicity between love and art -
one which in a sense we’ve always known about.
What I here name the ‘smile’ of the lovers, for a lack of a better
word, is a philosophical situation. Why? Because in it we once again
encounter something incommensurable, a relation without relation.
Between the event of love (the turning upside down of existence)
and the ordinary rules of live (the laws of the city, the laws of
marriage) there is no common measure. What will philosophy tell us
then? It will tell s that ‘we must think the event’. We must think the
exception. We must know what we have to say about what is not
ordinary. We must think the transformation of life.”- by Alain Badiou
-
summer stories:
dead cars society
-
![silezukuk:
Lee Lockwood, Two boys pose with the latest album by the Beatles, Vedado, Havana, 1965. [***]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lymuzmo2NO1qzfmh5o1_1280.jpg)
High Resolution -
The studio of Alberto Giacometti: 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Paris.
photos by Ernst Scheidegger
-
High Resolution -
High ResolutionLouis Armstrong in Egypt during a state-sponsered Goodwill tour of Africa and the Middle East, 1961
(via historyisinteresting)
-
"The violent spectacle of his disfigured body, which appeared on the front page of almost every European newspaper, became the model for misreading Pasolini’s private and intellectual life. This excessive biographical interpretation of Salo by critics and biographers reveals an obsessive search for the “truth” of Pasolini’s sexual desire, or sexual practice as it was inscribed in his films. What strikes me as sinister about such readings (did he deserve it? did he ask for it?) is that underneath these moral judgments lies the tendency to eroticize the sadistic violence of Said, and the violent circumstances of Pasolini’s death. The sexual scandal of Pasolini’s homosexuality and even the violent circumstances of his death have been used to obfuscate the more radical implications of Pasolini and his work. As a consequence, the anxiety caused by Pasolini’s “disturbing” representation of fascism as sadism becomes foreclosed. Rather than acknowledge Pasolini’s scrutiny of the limits of neocapitalism—its antihistorical, immoral, asexual, and inhuman mechanisms— moral condemnations of Pasolini’s sexuality evade critical engagement with his work, by turning Pasolini (and with him all of his work) into an aberration, a monster (abnormal and abject). Georges Bataille exposes the logic of this type of mechanism when he writes: “In judging so violently, one subtracts the monsters from the possible. One implicitly accuses them of exceeding the limit of the possible instead of seeing that their excess, precisely, defines this limit” (“Reflections on the Executioner and the Victim,” 19). This relegation of Pasolini’s body of work to the abject removes his ideological derivations from the ranks of legitimate Italian political and cultural analysis."
-—Ravetto, Kriss. 2001. The unmaking of fascist aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-
“The left is in trouble. It’s not got any ideas, it’s not got any independent analysis of its own, and therefore it’s got no vision. It just takes the temperature: ‘Whoa, that’s no good, let’s move to the right.’ It has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.”
[…] Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, believed in pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit. You must look at what’s happening now. If it’s unpropitious, say it’s unpropitious. Don’t fool yourself. Analyse the conjuncture that you’re in. Then you can be an optimist of the will, and say I believe that things can be different. But don’t go to optimism of the will first. Because that’s just utopianism.”
by Stuart Hall(Source: Guardian)
-
High Resolutionathens, 12/02/2012 - courtesy of Aris
The Barefoot Prince
