January 9, 2010
Because Yemen Deserves Some Good Press
November 5, 2009
New Sufjan Material: now less elusive than Bigfoot
Forget the 2008 presidential election, this is teaching me how to hope again.
As is true of most Sufjan, the first three and half minutes or so are stronger than the second, but diehard fans will love the whole damn thing.
November 5, 2009
Sometimes Success is Just a Can Away
Some days I just can’t just jumpstart my brain, so I grab a Vault soda, and somewhere between the 50 grams of sugar and who knows how much caffeine OH MY GOD I CAN DO ANYTHING. It’s high risk, but high reward. Oh caffeinated beverages, when it comes time to turn in this thesis and I put you in my works cited section, it will not be to be cute, but rather to do right by the Honor Code.
I’m fairly certain this is a habit future me will deeply regret–both ten years down the line, when I will be disgusted by my college eating habits, and a few hours from now, when I will be crashing from a fairly intense sugar high. But for now, it’s working wonders.
October 11, 2009
“I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders”
Every few months, I re-fall in love with The National. This is one of those times.
This particular song was used in the Obama campaign, I believe… a surprisingly angsty choice, but I suppose you’ve gotta have something to cut all that hope with.
October 11, 2009
All This Tragedy is Really Bumming Me Out
I’m writing my senior thesis this year on (deep breath) how ideologies behind terrorism and anti-terrorist operations are shown in films from America and the Middle East. So far this has basically meant that I watch all sorts of violent and/or depressing movies and am usually a lot of fun to be around afterwards, but at some point, it did start to feel more like someone doing work and less like an emotional pincushion. After all, what’s one more exploding bus, as long as it’s just on your computer screen?
This week, however, I’ve been focusing on “Paradise Now” (dir. Hany Abu-Assad), and I’ve got to tell you, all that “de-sensitivity” stuff has turned out to be a load of crap, because it’s gotten progressively more heartbreaking each time I watch it. Instead of the tragedy losing its effect, I just feel like I’m caught in this recurring loop of these characters (who I’ve now spent so much time with), leaving a human wake that extends on both sides of the conflict.
The film follows Khaled and Said, two best friends who are young, aimless and living in the West Bank, after they find out that they’ve been picked to carry out a terrorist operation in Tel Aviv. From the moment we meet them, we hope that something goes wrong, that these men don’t go through with this horrible act because they are so likable, or at the very least, so recognizable. Things do go awry, as you might expect of a movie longer than twenty minutes, but this leaves only one of the men to question the mission while the other becomes more convicted in its necessity.
For all its overt discussion of terrorism’s role in the resistance, the movie somehow escapes coming off as didactic. Suicide bombing by no means justified in the story, rather, given a face, which is sometimes all the discomfort the audience can handle. The real tragedy is not that young Palestinians are forced to terrorist means, but that they are convinced from both sides that they this is their only option, which not only perpetuates the violence in the conflict, but destroys the families and community they leave behind.
Beautifully shot and brilliantly edited, I can’t recommend “Paradise Now” highly enough. And if you don’t believe me, check out the American trailer below, which has some really confusing Alexi Murdoch music playing over shots of the West Bank.
October 10, 2009
Chernobyl ‘09, or, The Things I Lost in the Fire
This is what trust issues look like.
The day before I came back to school, my hard-drive, with no whimpers or warnings, completely died. Melted. Kicked the bucket. Apparently, all the little moving bits on the inside of its tiny computer-brain got jostled around one time too many and fell out. Or something. That’s what I gleaned from the MacMechanic employee who made a admirable attempt to explain the mysteries of modern technology to me at a time when I was not in a place to pretend to understand it.
Some time has obviously passed since, but it’s definitely been strange getting used to it. I’ve spent such a huge amount of time staring into the screen of this little white machine, that I can’t help but feel attached to it, in that nice, Aldous Huxley way we try to avoid thinking about most of the time. It feels as if I’ve lost someone to amnesia–we’ve spent so much time together, my laptop and I, and yet this new hard drive knows nothing of it. “Remember the good old days?” I ask. “When you remembered my photos, music, and documents?” But no, no it does not. It does not remember those happier times, and it sure as hell does not remember said files.
Which brings me to another point: letting go of the things I’ve been forced to let go of. While I was pretty good about backing up papers and most of my music, I somehow did not have the same healthy sense of fear and preparation for my pictures. Now everything earlier than 2007 is gone (save the few that went onto Facebook), meaning the photos I took in Yemen, Egypt, Europe, and of family in that time have simply vanished into the series of tubes that I assume describes my old computer’s brain about as accurately as it does the internet.
I’m trying to spin it myself by thinking of what I was lucky enough to get back, reminding myself that photographs should save as place-cards for memories, not substitutes for them. You know, be all Buddhist about it. After all, it’s not like actual experiences have been stolen from me.
There was a time when I actually thought I was going to remember everything in my life, every conversation, every thought, every slow afternoon or half-clear dream I woke up with. When I realized that this wasn’t going to work out, I tried to document it myself, almost to the point of obsession, writing everything down that I could for the better part of a year. But this, so it turns out, is also not how it works.
I think that’s what I generally like about photographs, that they make no pretense of trying to capture a whole experience, only a moment of it, a tiny, random cross section. And since I’m eventually going to lose the details to the hard drive of my own mind, I’d just appreciate all the help I can get.
August 30, 2009
Under Construction
(I am making some minor changes around the site, and jumping on the this-time-I-really-mean-it train back to blogging town.)
Mosque – Sana’a, Yemen (2008).
