From Boing Boing, re Katrina, Email from EMT

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median *household* income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.
The email attributed to a rescue worker reads:
There are dead animals floating in the water, pets left behind. Surely people thought they would be back to collect the pets. Not so. The rescuers smell like gas when they come back in; there's gas in all of the water that consumes the area. Fires are burning all over the place. Our teams are tired and they are thirsty and they are hungry. And they have a place to sleep and water to drink and food to eat. I can only imagine how the people without these "luxuries" are feeling right now.

Each night will be a race against time. When night falls, people can't get picked up from roofs, the rescuers can't chop into people's roofs to check the attics for anyone alive or for anyone dead (sadly, there are dead). At night we can't see power lines we can't see obstacles, we can't see any of the things that will bring down a helicopter or pose a danger to boats rescuers.

One of the teams came in today after having been out for hours at a time. One particular rescuer went straight to a corner and collapsed into tears. I went directly to him and just held his hand. What else could I do? I said nothing. He said it all. They lowered him 26 times and he pulled 26 people to safety. He wants to be back out there but there are mandatory rest periods. His tears are tears of frustration.

Entire teams are working on nothing but evacuating the hospitals. All four of the major hospitals are beginning to flood. Critical patients have to get out or surely they will be lost. Generators cannot run forever; that's just the way it is. There are limited facilities to take those that are rescued and those that need to be evacuated. Anything that leaves by air leaves by helicopter. There are no runways for planes that aren't under water. Only one drivable way in and out.

Water everywhere and more keeps coming. Until they can do something about the three levees that are broken, more water will come and more water will kill. The water poses major health threats. Anyone with even a small open cut is prone to infection. Anyone who touches this water and touches his eyes, nose or mouth without find a way to "clean" himself first will be sick with stomach problems before long. It's bad and it's getting worse. It's not going to be anything better than devastating for days or weeks at best.

I wish I could tell you that I'll check in again soon. I can't. I don't know when my next message will get out. We'll be leaving where we are within just an hour or so.

i could think of katrina, and the hell of 25k people in the superdome w/n adequte seweage, and the 100 people dead so far. or i could think of iraq and more journalists dying in a few years then the few decades of vietnam or i could think of the (maybe) overthrow in mynamar or that canadian law doesnt recoginse extracircualr same gender activity as adultery, or i could think about scalia going batshit over morality, but you know what i just finished my first draft of beauty queens, and its a fucking mess, but its done, so

TINYHOUSESMORETINYHOUSES

norwegian, modualr, similar to shingoura bens radical work with shipping containers.

Picture 3 in the Uta Barth link below, the insane almost radioactive green one, is an out of focus picture ofa vemeer reproduction (lacemakers), which makes it interesting, because it makes us look at it again--ubquity recreated is one of my favoutite themes--and also because everyone who has ever written about that peice talks of the light, but v. few mention the intensity and almost isolating frankness of the bluetones, esp. in how it secualrises the virigin mother, and perhaps makes a statement about domesticity (vemeer) by making the picture about colours in a similar tone, and making it domestic, barth draws a line from the virigin mother to the lace maker to the photog herself, who works domestically.

People to Mail Poetry To Tomorrow

Boston Review, E53–407 MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139.
(IRC Coupon)

Inkwell
(cover letter)
Inkwell
Manhattanville College
2900 Purchase Street, Box 1379
Purchase, NY 10577

Tin House
Winter, 2006. "ALL APOLOGIES." Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, profiles, and food and drink writing relating to apologies, confessions, or regrets. Deadline: September 30, 2005.
Tin House, P.O. Box 10500, Portland, OR 97210

Painted Bride Quarterly
Rutgers University-Camden
English Department-Armitage Hall
Camden, NJ 08102

Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review
Department of Creative Writing
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94132-1722

Bloom
P.O. Box 1231
Old Chelsea Station
New York, NY 10011

Prairie Schooner
201 Andrews Hall
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0334

[Sim] said that he'd once done an interview with a major news outlet, on the condition that they publish his address, with the notation that anyone interested in reading a full copy of "Tangent," his 20-page essay debunking the "feminist/homosexualist axis," could write to him, and he'd send them a full copy. He said he got exactly one query, and it was from a teenage girl, writing on Spice Girls stationary.

via the onion's trish robinsion

Link Time

28 Uta Barth Photos
The out of focus, concentration on form, light and colour are beautiful, and make the viewer abstract daily sight, reformalizes banal ordinary texts, esp. with her placing blank paper/other forms (ie prints, paintings, etc) near or in substution for the photographic prints themselves, makes us wonder what the difference b/w object making are. i love these. (MocoLoco)

Silver Ring Thing has been denied public money because they were too faith based. This is interesting, because of the much more explict religous work that has been given money w/o controversy...subtext for this that i havent figured out. (Majikste)

real time atom bomb watercolours
Watercolour was often used, from Cook onwards, to document new scientific excercises, so this ties into that, and it oddly/disconcertingly connects to the paradise/polynesian noble savage readings that were common thruout the 19th century as well (ie Stevenson and Gaugain, obviously.) (boing boing)


Anti Sheenan Photos
lots of red baiting, calls to god, ad homeniem attacks, the discourse that runs thru these are really interesting. (mefi)
and from the left just for balance

Radical Sepratists in India are making porn films to further the revoultion

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses.htm

tiny houses
well designed, v. small, and hand crafted houses, with amazing use of space, for between 15-40k, and they ship too!

im a little excited about getting a handcrafted, constructed home for less then 60k

1) femminism, the difference b/w urban and rural; the dismissial of womens voices in main stream femminism, etc; womens work and farm work, etc
2) accomplishment and presentation--what it means to balance b/w two tradtional gender presentations, being a woman and being a farmer, being butch and being femme; and grafting that to the idea of modern business professional
3) how close these people are to the land, and the larger concerns about communities of growers and producers, the rural community extending to all sorts of these kinds of events, how they connect to the state fairs for example
4) the history of this, esp, how most of them are post WWII, and how it becomes an almost thanksgiving prayer amongst plenty, and lots of beauty contests became really impt post wwii, so the tension b.w pageant and not being a pageant is there from the beginning
5) the politics of the domesitc.

Americans never spoke Standard English. Americans have never spoken English. George Washington and them beat the people who spoke English and drove them out of here. Most of the white people in America are Cockneys, Irish, Scottish, they never spoke English either. There are more English speakers in Nigeria than in the United States. There are more English speakers in India than in England.

Amiri Bakara, qouted by Silliman on his blog

About Eyes Wide Shut and other things

MartinHSkidmore (4:14:30 AM): I think Kubrick knows deadpan and knows satire, but I didn't spot a lot of either in EWS
AnthonySEaston (4:15:23 AM): how can the papal masked orgy be anything but
MartinHSkidmore (4:16:03 AM): I don't recall that bit clearly, but ridiculous isn't necessarily the same as funny
AnthonySEaston (4:18:25 AM): it actually wasnt erotic at all, either
MartinHSkidmore (4:18:52 AM): yeah, I agree with that
AnthonySEaston (4:20:42 AM): its anti eroticism may have been part of the camp readng though
MartinHSkidmore (4:21:21 AM): or it may be part of a director who can't do human feeling, sexual or otherwise
AnthonySEaston (4:21:42 AM): he did human feeling well in barry lyndon
MartinHSkidmore (4:22:22 AM): I don't think I ever saw that, but it seemed a failing of his generally
AnthonySEaston (4:23:14 AM): i think that a cold analytical eye to human failings, and a fear of humanity isnt t he same as someone who cant do human feelings though?
MartinHSkidmore (4:24:01 AM): no it isn't, but I don't think he had those things
AnthonySEaston (4:24:59 AM): maybe hes an aspie
AnthonySEaston (4:25:07 AM): i connect to him as an aspie, in alot of ways
MartinHSkidmore (4:25:19 AM): that's an interesting point
MartinHSkidmore (4:25:26 AM): I have no idea about SK
MartinHSkidmore (4:25:41 AM): but I guess it gives you another way of relating to some films
AnthonySEaston (4:26:44 AM): to some art
AnthonySEaston (4:26:59 AM): to warhol, to kubrick, to baker in some ways
MartinHSkidmore (4:27:14 AM): Baker?
AnthonySEaston (4:28:24 AM): nicholson
MartinHSkidmore (4:28:53 AM): ah, good call
AnthonySEaston (4:29:12 AM): im not saying they do have aspergers, you know what i mean
MartinHSkidmore (4:29:18 AM): yeah, I know
MartinHSkidmore (4:29:27 AM): and it makes sense
MartinHSkidmore (4:29:45 AM): there's an interesting article in this, except I don't know who would be buying it
AnthonySEaston (4:31:09 AM): no one ever buys for much anyways
AnthonySEaston (4:31:24 AM): do you mind if i blog some of this?
MartinHSkidmore (4:31:38 AM): why would I mind?
MartinHSkidmore (4:31:42 AM): of course not
MartinHSkidmore (4:31:49 AM): it's interesting

got there, got 20 minutes to look over material, tried to find a thread, walked in, 3 people, 40 years older then me, the worker talked, i talked, questions asked, questions answered, left the room, more questions, wait 2-4 weeks, see the large egg, take pictures, stop for burger, mashed, vanilla shake, etc at roadside diner, see two herons, two mallards, and a bison on the trip, talk to raymonds mom thruout

THIS!

BrokeBack Mountain Trailer

i know that the story is about how to negiote the wide space of the prarie and the narrow space of domestic spheres, and the explicit affection between the two principles is what makes it so raw and so impt; i think that the trailer makes the sex b/w men awkard and the domesticity joyous, i think (i worry) that it connects the idea of gay shame, and that it will not be the queer story of the prolux (queer defined in all the usual ways)

the story is really fantastic, because it works against the idea of gayness, the idea that tenderness and devoition can occur in ways that are negoited b/w people and not identity, and i worry the film wont do that

good cast, good writers, good director with good gay themes, i hope

everything is stalled and i hate waiting.
too much of a hassle and too much of a burden to other people.
thinking of quitting everything

its that i need people more then they need me, and well being a drain, and not being able to make my way thru is botherting me more then i can stand, regardless of how other people are handling this.

red head by teller for ray

(i have seen this photo a million times, but look at the far corner, the bright edge there in blue and yellow is a sex position by positions that is found in pattasons work, interesting--what was hinted at is now fully shown?)


jurgen teller is a little more complex then i gave him credit for, i think though his formalism is v. much a way to process away from the usual politics and poetics of portrature (god im sorry for that alliteration) ie his 1996 (check date) book go-sees, or qoutidan poloaroids of models showing up to agencies for their chance to make it big, it has the amuater porn/high art conceptual sheen of lots of pomo hiart photos, lost in pattasons work.

william it was really nothing

http://christianpatterson.com/blog/2004_09_01_archive.html

On Sept 6 (rest of the blog is worth checking out) is a photo of william eggleston eating bbq near memphis with jurgen teller. think of them, think of the photos they take--the portratis that are so casual and intimate they depend on the polite fiction that the voyuer is not there, this young upstart intern takes a photo of them together, and they ignore him--continuing that polite fiction of course. (the exception is the famous eggleston of the woman lin the blue dress, sitting on the yellow curb with the newspaper, seductive that one is)

other things
maybe im a snob, but i cannot imagine that eaggleston eats where he shots (or lives where he shits), the colour, the ephermality seems almost too much for eggleston, too perfect an allusion---hunting in the blog archives, we see an invite for pattasons big brooklyn show, pinking up the red room that made william famous.

Pattason is really interesting because he is so much a son to eggleston--in the sense that he interned with him, that photography is much more of a craft (or was much more of a craft), then other art forms, the workshop, with the assitants working for free, until they devolp a practice of their own is still in play (and is in play for some painters--koons and murakami are the most immediate to mind). Eggleston and his followers have an isolation, darkness, almost meloncholy that Patterson doesnt have.

ive been reading the second volume of wyhoming stories by annie prolux (worth it/77) and her sense of place is so imbuded, that the people are real, even if the stories arent, and looking at pattasons photos of Casper, and thinking, they are like the photos everyone takes of things on the prarie, they are PRESENT, they are filed with the brightness of the land, the glaring and opressive weaher that cannot be escaped from.

the other great thing, that is different from eggleston--is that thru blogging, and thru his connections to vice magazine, etc--he is v, much on the vangarde of an updating of the eggleston, (if we include shore as a son, then thsi is 3rd generation (are shore and eggleston the same generation?, what about tilliman who is v. much later--maybe it goes E/S/T/McGinley or does it go ES/TM?), where the presence i was taking about has a very explicit versmilitude, they see the eggleston and the shore as stage(s/d)

so we have people looking at the camera, then away from the camera, then back at the camera, the looking is what matters, the lack of self awareness--the struggle of sorting what it is, domeunctation, art, craft. all of those, none of those?

PINK

pink!

Rogers v. Koons, 960 F. 2d301, 310 (CA2 1992)