World View

Burma sunrise

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 3

Mother Country or Fatherland?

Hard times, confusing times, no warnings, times of war.  Portents of ending.  Intimations of catastrophe.  Holocaust guilt, nuclear annihilation, the depletion of the ozone, the tigers, the whales, and the spotted owls.

Boredom, weariness, repetitiveness, kept waiting in an outer office, unrelenting crankiness, nagging falsity, insufferable predictability.  There must be more than this.  The price of oil is computed in two currencies, dollars and blood, and payments in both must be made in instalments. 

Life is a series of arrangements and adjustments within which the consequence of error is total disaster.  The only safe assumption is that what one is doing is probably wrong.  Red in tooth and claw, the world is monumentally foolish, sadistically violent, repulsively corrupt and insanely alive.  Much of it is devoid of history and any notion of collective social context.  Sweltering boredom first, and then the anxiety of impending disaster, alternate as moment to moment concerns.

There are no-go areas where it is dangerous to belong to the wrong ethnic group, where they will cut off your finger to get the ring.  There are bearded gunmen on the streets now, backed by portraits 20 feet high of Khomeini and the martyrs Beheshti and Chamran.  Ayatollah Montazeri looks scornfully from a hoarding, Hussein himself from another, the Twelfth Imam, his horses oozing blood amid the carnage on the fields of Kerbala.  At the check points they ask whether you come from a mother country or a fatherland.


To be continued...

Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Sri Lanka

Beginning roughly ten thousand years ago, having wiped out most of the world's megafauna, fully anatomically modern Homo sapiens began to domesticate some of the various plant and animal species with which they found themselves sharing the environment.

Spain

The transition to the so-called Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture laid the social and economic foundations for the emergence of civilization and led to highly complex and varied relationships between sapiens and all the other animal species globally.


To be continued...

Ruins of Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in history to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.

Even with hindsight it’s impossible to be sure whether the use of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the post-war nuclear arms race or whether the bombs demonstrated their horror in a way that no harmless experiment could ever have done, and so helped to hold the ultimate violence in check throughout the Cold War.

The Long Run

Think of time. Once it was a cycle of agricultural events, of birth, of death and the unfolding of God’s will. Now it ticks away in units of money; in bank notes and per diems, weekly wages, monthly salaries, mortgage payments, half-yearly dividends, annual raises and bonuses, superannuation pensions, perpetual stock and, eventually, in units of that redemptive eternity which economists call the long run.

The World in Black and White

Nina & Analisa

No Thanks, Just Looking

The girl they offered me, for 1,200 baht, was exquisite and just 14 years old, so they said. It was her first day on the job, and she was special, they said. But when our eyes met, the only possible form of communication, since neither one of us spoke a single word that the other understood; I could see that she was badly frightened.

The perceptive madam pointed her long red fingernail toward another girl gyrating naked on the elevated bar who looked a few years older. Perhaps I’d prefer somebody with a little more experience for the same price, she suggested.

Behind us on a flood-lit stage, a naked couple, looking bored and distracted, went through the motions of sex like a pair of trained animals. A drunken crowd of eager voyeurs milled about and cheered the more exotic positions. Blunt negotiations were taking place all around me.

When it became clear I wasn’t a customer, a group of muscular bouncers moved in and extorted 50 times the going rate for the beer I’d ordered. I swiftly found myself back in the river of degradation that flows through Patpong Road.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

The Night Doctor

Manipulated photography, nothing more, nothing less.