Just How Much Is $9 Trillion?

"On December 1, the Fed was forced to release details of 21,000 funding transactions it made during the financial crisis...The Fed has thus far reported, without even disclosing specifics of its lending from its discount window, which it continues to draw a dark curtain around, that it supplied, in total, more than $9 trillion to Wall Street firms, commercial banks, foreign banks, corporations and some highly questionable off balance sheet entities.

The data starkly show a comatose Wall Street being resuscitated with whatever financial might the Federal Reserve could pump into its tangled web of funding vehicles. It also points to how the Fed was dispersing sums which dwarfed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout program while allowing the TARP to take the media heat for obscene funding of Wall Street."

Read the full story by Pam Martens: The Tax-Payers' Tab: a Cool $9 Trillion and Then Some

Hmmmm...maybe this is a more appropriate image?

Credits:
Photomontage and background image: mark swindle | design-ia
stack of money: http://www.worldofstock.com/closeups/BCO2576.php
his Trump-ness: http://suburbarazzi.lohudblogs.com/category/donald-trump/
moonrise: http://vjac.free.fr/skyshows/raysshadows/moonrises/2009jan10_moonrise/2009jan10_moonrise_2.jpg
leaning forward: http://utopianvision.co.uk/pictures/diya-mirza/2644/
If you stack one million one dollar bills on top of each other how tall would it be?: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/964254

Cheney Dodges the Bullet Again

All 16 charges filed by the Nigerian government against Dick Cheney were dropped yesterday after Halliburton agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement of $250 million. Last year one of Halliburton's units, KBR, reached a settlement of $579 million in US courts on charges of paying $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials during the years Cheney headed Halliburton.¹

To put this into perspective: if you or I get charged with a speeding ticket, we can do something that amounts to the same thing. You give the court $50 or $100 and you can get the violation cleansed from your record. In effect it's saying "Yes, I'm guilty, but take some of my money and let's pretend this whole sordid business never happened."²

Corporations do the same sort of thing: in exchange for avoiding the long, costly and embarrassing testimony of a trial, they can reach an out-of-court settlement. In this case a quarter-of-a-billion dollars.

This made me wonder…

Why would the Nigerian government agree to such a settlement?
As with almost every other Third World country whose resources are sought after by the Americans, Russians, Europeans or Chinese, the use of bribes to buy out administrative officials within the target country is nothing new; once bought they do what they can to facilitate resource extraction - including suppression of labor, health and environmental concerns and parties. Perhaps some of these same officials were part of the group that reached the agreement. Long story short: don't want to bite the hand that feeds you. Just slap it.

Also consider this: even if there had been a criminal conviction, because of a lack of effective mechanisms to enforce a conviction across international boundaries - especially when you're talking about the likes of the United States or, say, Israel - Nigeria's acceptance of the settlement offer was probably just a common sense decision: although the US is willing to bend over backwards to get its mitts on Julian Assange (and allows rendition of terror suspects to countries known to torture) you'd better believe it won't let one of its own be given up to the likes of Nigeria - or the ICC for that matter.


Why would Halliburton pay such a huge sum to avoid the trial of its former president  - and former Vice-President of the United States?
Between 1994 and 2004, Halliburton is charged with paying $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas facility. Hell…that's only $1 in bribes for every $33 of contract, shaving a mere 3% of the profit margin. ³

It may have helped that former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker III interceded on Cheney's behalf. Why, you may wonder, would a former President and Secretary of State step forward to stop the prosecution (and, one would hope, the imprisonment) of the former corporate executive and Vice-President of the United States? Perhaps they are gay lovers and don't like the idea of Dick getting sodomized by a prison full of angry Nigerian Black men? Nawwww…it's probably nothing quite this personal and has a lot more to do with Nigeria's rank as the world's 11th largest oil producer. America would be like a whiny junkie if its oil supply was to be disrupted.⁴

What does such a settlement represent?
An out-of-court settlement isn't necessarily an admission of guilt, true: often the corporate defendant will crunch the cost-benefit numbers and offer a settlement even in the case of innocence. With an endless barrage of litigation targeted at the company, Halliburton may simply have wanted to avoid a further tarnishing of its image...though if you were already accused of assisting in the gang rape of a continent, pissing oil in the oceans, and ripping off taxpayers in one colossal con after another, what the hell would you care about further cementing your image in the Halls of Infamy? Maybe a better explanation is that to Halliburton the settlement amount is a paltry sum, and that a conviction here would have opened the door to convictions elsewhere. They can't kill all the witnesses to their crimes - not that I'm accusing them of murder, especially since it would be much easier to have paid-off officials do the dirtywork.

Of much greater concern is the lack of accountability on the environmental wreckage of the Niger River Delta by the oil and gas companies. During the months following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Nigerians were perplexed at the severity of reaction against BP, since its Delta "has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates."⁵ Hence this represents once again the absence of justice in one of the most severe environmental catastrophes on the African continent.

Business as usual, it seems. Corporations (and their helmsmen) consistently get off the hook, no matter how egregious their crimes. As Dr. Sezneva remarked "In an era of increasing multi-national corporate control, we can expect more and more of this in years to come."


1 Nigeria to drop Dick Cheney charges after plea bargain

2 Sweden appeals UK granting bail for Julian Assange: This Very Bad Man's bail bond was set at a paltry $316,000!

3 Halliburton: Wikipedia reports, however, that the Halliburton subsidiary paid only a paltry $2.4 million - or a rate of return of $2500 for every $1 of bribes. Wikipedia

4 Oil Reserves in Nigeria: "Although Libya has more reserves,  there were 36.2 billion barrels (5.76×10^9 m3) of proven oil reserves in Nigeria as of 2007,  ranking the country as the largest oil producer in Africa and the 11th largest in the world,  averaging 2.28 million barrels per day (362×10^3 m3/d) in 2006. At current rates this would be 43 years of supply if no new oil was found." Wikipedia

5 Far From Gulf,  a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old, June 16, 2010 the New York Times

Photos:
Photo montage and Bakersfield oil field photo: Mark Swindle | design-ia

Cheney photo: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/cheney-spokesperson-bp.php

Bush Sr photo: http://americanhistory.about.com/od/uspresidents/ig/Images-of-US-Presidents/George-H-W-Bush.htm

Bush Jr photo: http://connect.in.com/george-bush-jokes/photos-1-1-1-1256e192787a1693e8171e8bf300d845.html

James Baker photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JamesBaker.jpeg

Niger oil spill: Austin Ekeinde/Reuters http://brightnepenthe.blogspot.com/2010/06/scoping-problem-and-petroleum-industry.html

The Toppling of the Statue

CHICAGO - Bankrupted by The Endless Wars...

IRAQ WAR:

AfGHANISTAN WAR:

WAR ON DRUGS:


...citizens performed an enraged Americanized version of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein of April 9, 2003, using commandeered construction equipment and explosives on the Sears Tower (aka the "Willis Tower"), the famous Chicago landmark. Spearheaded by the ad hoc Citizens for Economic, Political and Social Justice (CEPSJ), the effort capped weeks of street protests venting pent-up frustration over the failed wars, the appropriation of funds from education, health and infrastructure; and a deeply-rooted multi-generational hatred of corporate behavior. "We thought the bad guys were over there...you know Sodom Hussein, Obama sin Lad-de-da or whatever his name was...where the hell did he go, anyway?..." remarked the unemployed construction worker who wired the detonating caps at the southwest corner, "...but it sure seems the real Bad Men are in the boardroom."

Miriam Falltower, laid off 2 years ago from her CPS teaching position and selected to press the button due to her most-appropriate last name concurred: "First the class size went up and the benefits down. Then the job disappeared altogether. The final straw was the tax cuts passed last week the President had to dish up to the Republicans in exchange for unemployment benefits extension. A tax cut for the richest? That's it! I'm fed up with the Iraqi War and the Afghan War and War on Drugs and the war on this and the war and that...it's time for a goddamned class war!" she yelled to the cheers of the crowd around here.

"I always kind of thought this building was an eyesore," remarked Daniel Rightangle - an architecture grad whose tuition costs will saddle him with over $100,000 of debt, "though I'm not the kind who advocates destruction just out of aesthetic distaste. This thing was a symbol. I'm sure we'll all end up labeled as terrorists...but, you know, I'm fed up with anyone not agreeing with the status quo being called a "terrorist!"

In a modern-day application of swords-into-plowshares, the building materials will go into the construction of schools, neighborhood medical facilities and continuing education/re-training centers, while the vacated site will house a think tank dedicated to peaceful problem-solving, international cooperation and a rethinking of failed US policies.

Terror Alert

It’s not about the truck bomb, it’s the bananas*
On May 7 the Sundance Channel pulled Day Night Day Night, a film by Julia Loktev (pictured here), from its schedule a few days after the explosives-packed Pathfinder was found in Times Square. The movie follows a 19-year old female suicide bomber - planning to self-detonate in Times Square - through 48 hours of tension, training and doubt - without revealing her reasons for taking on the task. In contrast to a plethora of shit-kicker thrillers wherein the audience gets to extract revenge, years later, for 9-11 by proxy-punching-in-the-face, kicking-in-the-balls and otherwise giving a merciless ass-fucking to The Bad Guys, this one is much much more ambiguous. And, therefore, more threatening to a country hellbent on throwing the responsibility for thoughtful politics into the garbage disposal ever since.

In the hours following the attacks on the financial and military symbols of American power, I maintained a naive hope the events might serve as a wake-up call for America to re-access the impact of its decisions on the rest of the world. While I didn't find it difficult at all to comprehend why much of the world hates the US, perhaps it was possible the shock of these acts might jolt the mainstream political discourse into some awareness of the desperation and anger that make terrorism an option. In the days following, I abandoned this hope completely: while billing itself as a Christian nation (and, therefore, it seemed, one obligated to forgiveness), America had nothing other than bloodlust and revenge in mind, and has spent the last 9-plus years exacting it.

There were bright spots. RETHINK, a 7-pound volume that "confronts our diversity,  our stupidity and cleverness,  our preoccupations and rage,  our laughter and desperate tears,  our need for justice and love,  our thirst for blood and power" was a thought-provoking attempt to learn from 9-11 - instead of merely reacting with the most base of instincts. Granta 77 explored the roots of anti-Americanism. And Loktev's movie imparted a sense of empathy for those who undergo the experience of volunteering for a dead-end action without passing judgment on their decision to do so. By not answering the question Why is she doing this? the viewer is compelled to ask Why would anyone want to do this? And because she is not demonized, there is a freedom to consider this question with impartiality and clear-headedness.

And this is precisely why it was dead-wrong for Sundance to pull the movie when it did: it is situations like the attempted bombing in Times Square where we should be wondering why someone would want to do this, and what has been done to get them there. Then, as a free nation, to make adjustments in thought, policy and action. And this is also why the documents released by WikiLeaks - chronicling the machinations of the US over this period - need to see the light of day.

Julia's first movie, Moment of Impact, examined the consequences of an event on April Fool's Day, 1989, when her father was struck by a car. Her forthcoming movie, The Loneliest Planet, starring Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg is a minimalist thriller set in the Republic of Georgia.


*An extract from What Makes Julia Loktev, the Director of a New Movie About a Female Suicide Bomber, Tick? in the NYMag. The full quote: "One Chechen girl in Moscow blew up a truck bomb by running it into a convoy,  but before she did,  she stopped and bought some bananas, ” explains Loktev. “I thought,  It’s not about the truck bomb,  it’s the bananas.” Or the pretzel. In Day Night Day Night,  Williams stands in front of the Duane Reade on 42nd Street,  eating one. With mustard."


Sources/Links:
1 Media Decoder: Sundance Channel Pulls a Film About a Times Square Suicide Bomber
2 NY Mag: What Makes Julia Loktev, the Director of a New Movie About a Female Suicide Bomber, Tick?
3 IMDB: Julia Loktev, Day Night Day Night, Loneliest Planet

Secrets Inside

The Wikileaks saga is provoking thoughtfulness on the nature of secrets.
We tend to forgive those who may have violated an oath of secrecy - as Daniel Ellesburg did with the release of what were to become known as The Pentagon Papers - if we sense good intentions. Linda Tripp, on the other hand, is not being smiled on by history, since her efforts to tease the secrets of a Presidential infidelity from Monica were asbout as far from noble as it's possible to sink.

Julian Assange came out of hiding this week and voluntarily turned himself in for questioning (and incarceration) after months of hiding. So, too, Mr Ellsburg, who (understandably) was in fear of his life: only after the Watergate scandal did it become known that the Nixon Administration - unable to combat the truth of what was revealed in the documents - attempted instead to smear his reputation by using the same team that bungled the Watergate burglary to break into the office of Ellsburg's psychiatrist, hoping to locate evidence of an unhinged mind. Unlike Ellsburg, it's not yet possible to know Assange's innocence...though headlines of "sex crimes," "rape" and "molestation" seem so far removed from the latest assessment - that his failure to use condoms transmogrified the liaison into non-consensual sex - gives food for charges of "smear campaign." I'm not sure that WikiLeak's release of the State Department's documents led to a plan by the American and/or Swedish governments to actively bait-and-trap Assange, but I am sure that this diverts attention away from the much larger topic of state secrets - and what they tell us about the gulf between what governments (and corporations*) say and what they think and do.

A second standard by which whistleblowers are evaluated is the effect of the secrets they release. One has to wish that WikiLeaks had access to White House and Downing Street conversations in 2003: unlike Tripp's revelations - which crippled a Presidency by appealing to a darker part of our Nature (Puritanical outrage) - knowledge of the effort to scam the public into support of an expedition that had no legal or factual underpinning might have prevented or, at least, minimized the impacts, of the Iraqi War.

The telling of a secret can be cathartic. Someone undergoing chemotherapy - as my father is - might try to muscle through the experience in silence, but that's too hard a road to go on your own, and once the secret's out, the outpouring of love and support can be enormous. Lifesaving, even. Divulging a secret about an STD takes on a slightly different feel because a moral thread is there for anyone who wants to grab onto i; for example a statement like "I have Hepatitis C" invariably makes the listener wonder "Are you an IV drug user?" That makes keeping this sort of secret even more stressful for its keeper.  "Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret that’s using you?"¹ In Alex van Warmerdam's Abel the father's infidelity with the woman who his son has taken as a lover slumps deliciously, giddy and uncaring after everything comes out into the open. Even if he has been more or less destroyed in the process.

Several years back the man with whom I share a father let me in on a family secret. Its release caused not so much catharsis as belly laughter then sadness - both from the scope of the misunderstanding. It had to do with the use of a 4-syllable word I'd flung at him (the father) many years ago when - it seemed to me - he fell flat at coming through on a promise. In my mind these longer expressions utterly trump their 4-letter counterparts...there are so many inflections possible: the Mother- can be a slowly-spoken lead-in to its more-vulgar trailing term; they can both be delivered machine-gun style; one can channel the delivery style used in Blaxploitation films. Endless possibilities! But what if your listener takes a literal interpretation of the insult? And for years the lines you deliver - "Dad, I love you" or "What is going on with your software these days?" goes into their ears with a "Yeah, but you think I shagged my mother!" always tacked onto the end of it. I'm left wondering which caused more damage: this vulgarity, or all of his letters to me I sent back a few days later. And of how much smaller  the rift might have been had everything been brought out into the open.

This is only one of many secrets we have as a family and like other families there's always a constant weighing of what's to be gained vs. how much damage could be done with their release. In the case of Wikileaks you have former Presidential contender calling for the execution of Assange² - but not calling for an investigation of the war crimes committed by the Administration that have led to an excess of 100,000 deaths.

The Photo: This is a 2006 portrait taken of my father, George Swindle, who's possessed of a truly brilliant mind and an unequivocally good heart. Needless to say our relationship has had a lot of ups and downs, but never with any lapse in the love, affection or irritation we feel for each other.I picked this because it suggests the opacity, guardedness and inscrutability I've known - and loved - him for - as well as the thoughtfulness he summons before speaking.

*Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell's infiltration of the Nigerian government - and the corresponding green light to engage in the destruction of the Niger River Delta - came to light this week as part of the latest release of documents by WikiLeaks

¹ From Back Swan Green, by David Mitchell.
² "Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty," he told reporters while signing books at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif. [Huffington Post]

Ellsburg Redux

The VietNam War and the Iraq War bear striking similarities. Both were begun under highly questionable pretexts (as many wars are - e.g. the sinking of the USS Maine, which led to the Spanish American War in 1898; Nazi Germany's efforts to "liberate East Prussia from Poland) with the Gulf of Tonkin incident used by President Johnson, in 1964, to authorize the use of American forces against North Vietnam; and a claim that Saddam Hussein's government (first) had ties to AlQaeda, later replaced by claims of evidence of WMD's leading to the invasion that began in March, 2003.

Both were incredibly costly. Nearly 7 years later - at a cost in excess of $700 billion* and between 100,000 and 150,000 dead - the Iraqi conflict remains unending, Iraq a shambles, anti-American extremists invigorated, and the reputation of the U.S. at historical lows. In the 9 years between its outbreak and the Paris Peace Accord of January, 1973, the VietNam War's cost was also in the hundreds-of-billions, and casualties at approximately 2 million. America suffered its first war time defeat.

On June 13, 1971, the NY Times published its first excerpts from The Pentagon Papers. These were a set of documents leaked by Daniel Ellsburg, who had high-level access to the complete set of documents under study by a commission appointed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsburg went into hiding after their release. The Nixon Administration tried a number of strategies - court orders¹; a direct request from the President; and repeated attacks on his character - including a break-in at his psychiatrist's office by the same group, The White House Plumbers, who were later convicted of the break-in to DNS Headquarters - i.e. Watergate. When Ellsburg eventually surrendered to authorities, he had this to say:

I felt that as an American citizen,  as a responsible citizen,  I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.

The Pentagon Papers fed anti-war sentiment by showing that the US government deliberately misled its citizens in regard to expectations of costs and casualties of the war. Evidence of covert actions - including massive bombing campaign of Laos and Cambodia - also came to light later. It may be stated with some assurance that his actions helped reduce the damage and duration of the War; Ellsburg has since received the Ron Ridenhour Courage Prize,  the Gandhi Peace Award from Promoting Enduring Peace, and the Right Livelihood Award.

Without the full evidence, it's impossible to determine the guilt or innocence of Julian Assange, who was today arrested after his court hearing in the UK. The press seems to have riveted its attention on the allegations of  sexual misconduct - perhaps under pressure from those governments (most notably the US) who have suffered extreme embarrassment with the disclosure of diplomatic cables. While Assange's character may not stand up to that of Ellsburg's, it seems important to remember that Wikileaks is not Julian Assange but is an organization whose actions - while endangering some lives may save many more lives by bringing the actions of governments (and, one hopes, corporations) into the light of day where they can be scrutinized by the public. For that reason I nominated Assange - i.e. Wikileaks - for Time Magazine's Man of the Year Award today.

About the image: This is a heavily-Photoshopped photograph taken in 2007 at the Papal Palace in Avignon - a seat of corruption if ever there was one. I picked it because it suggests a "halls of power" feel, along with the feel of a lurking unknown - i.e. secrets. The white text is a descriptive of Wikileaks most recent document release, while the orange is extracted from an article published today about Assange's arrest.

*Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimates the overall cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan War at $3 trillion, taking into account diversion of funds from infrastructure investments, long-term health care cost to the injured, etc. Bush Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion.

¹ The first successful attempt by the federal government to restrain the publication of a major newspaper since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War [wikipedia]

The Portuguese Patient

I picked this photo after reading today of a photographer for the NYTimes, Joao Silva, who lost both legs when he stepped on a landmine last month in Afghanistan. Somehow picking a beautiful landscape photo or a montage with a giant rabbit seemed absurd after reading about someone else who likes to take pictures in much riskier settings; I saw his work - along with other harrowing photographs of war and suffering - last summer during the World Press Photo exhibit here in Amsterdam. 

In the foreground stands a ghostly version of my nephew, Freeman, who does EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). You'll be familiar with the tension associated with this line of work in the form of Kip (if you've read The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje) or Sergeant James (in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker). At his feet lies one of many explosive devices scattered around the EOD school, from which he graduated in January, 2007.

He recently returned from 6 months in Iraq, with all limbs intact. The only color I've left in the image is to highlight the legs of the 3 women in the background, one of whom is his mother. Ann is a solid Leftist at heart, and had a rough time with Freeman's decision to enter the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but made her peace with it by adapting a typical argument "If more good people were lawyers, then there wouldn't be so many bad lawyers around" to "The military could use someone with a good heart, like Freeman." Indeed though he is rumored to have enjoyed a boyish glee with blowing up stuff during training, his interest lay in helping get rid of all the unexploded ordnance laying around the world.* I hope when he finishes his contract soon, he'll move quickly in that direction.

A website has been setup to help raise money for Joao's recovery. You can do a direct donation or purchase his photography.

*According to Unicef, there are an estimated 110 million landmines scattered around the globe. And he U.S. military dropped more than 1.6 million tons of bombs on Laos during the war in Vietnam - more than it dropped on all of Europe during World War II - with about 30% of these still lying around [Boston Globe et al]

He could SO kick my ass now!

You see your best friend tomorrow, they look the same as today. You see them next year...same story. But you turn the other way for a just a minute and some little varmint who's at a height where you can study the top of their head in detail...

...is suddenly looming over you and, an top of it all, looking like a young Nick Cave. I must have seen this coming, if this photo is any indication, since it marks me as "guilty" for thinking thoughts of placing a large weight on his head to keep him from growing. And he looks as if he knows I'm thinking those thoughts.

That was, actually, a pretty wrenching day, but for other reasons. It was the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary party at The Hideout. I'd first seen David Yow (of Jesus Lizard) perform in a day-glo green mini-skirt at Reckless on Broadway in 1988, when Charlie - the The Quaker Goes Deaf - was working there. And that's what threw me...no, not David Yow, but running into Charlie. The closing of the record store named after his persona had been a tough affair, and I was struggling with the grief of the store being gone, and the friendship with Charlie taking a huge hit in the process. But a lot of growth has happened since then: the friendship has been restored, he once again does a radio show by the same name every Friday from 6-8 on WESN.org; and I obviously had no success impeding Dante's movement skyward.

Improbabilities: On and Around Queen's Day

This photograph was such a perfect example of what I want to post that I decided to use it for this blog's banner:

Taken from an album of the same title - Improbabilities: On and Around Queen's Day - it's the classical close-up of an eye with a reflection of the immediate world. Zoom in and you can see drops of moisture on the eyelid, patterning of the skin cells of the eyelid...even the brick wall and the photographer in front of it.* It makes me remember the delight of that first time of locking eyes with your lover and seeing yourself reflected in the bottomless inky black depths of their pupils.

*I enjoy the possibility that this flagship image was not taken by me (though I'm pretty sure it was). It was, however, definitely inspired by Jean-Brice after he shot two similar images of the same eye.

The Eastern Lands

Taken from above the San Fransisco Bay on the morning of September 17, 2007, as I took leave of the third marriage, the first of several steps that have led me across the Atlantic to The Netherlands. It would be too maudlin to post an image of the grief that was part of the trip...and this picture seems to capture better the symbolism of the event. Ingrid had moved West - an action apropos to an American Studies/Pop Culture scholar - a few months earlier. The scale of the airplane's engine suggests a relentless energy pulling the plane into the opposite direction, the boat below anchored to the waters of the Pacific, the flight and altitude themselves giving the feeling of lightness, release and possibility. Our wedding bands lay in the shallows off n Alameda beach.

Five decades in a land I have a love-hate relationship with have ended; beyond indoctrination years I never bought the Manifest Destiny mythology used to justify Western expansion and now at a time when we've run out of Western Lands into which to expand, William Burrough's rendering of it as the place of the dead seems a more appropriate metaphor.* The Netherlands has plenty of blood on its hands from its own Age of Empire, but seems to have progressed at least a little toward a more just and humane society; hopefully the PVV and Geert Wilders are a temporary aberration.

In architecture you're not supposed to render your design with too many growy things, since the building should be able to stand on its own. Modern art is criticized for too often requiring an accompaniment of a written description to decipher the artist's intent - but we all find ourselves reading these explanations when we visit a gallery or museum, and often the work goes off in our head like a bomb when something is revealed about the process or intent. Same here: this is just one of countless airplane photos out there, but it's the act of turning this particular one into a story that makes it gain emotional resonance. And that's the idea behind this photoblog: post images that stand on their own as visually interesting, then expand on how it was taken, what I was thinking of when it was taken, it's meaning or its connection to other times, places and ideas.

*This Wikipedia entry appropriately includes a thrown-into-the water reference: "Scenes that are unmistakably auto-biographical include vignettes where Burroughs takes out evidence of amphetamine prescription bottles his mother gave him to sink with a large stone at the bottom of Lake Worth, Florida. The bottles were evidence his mother found in her grandson’s, Burroughs own son, bedroom. While Burroughs is ankle deep in the water, his aged mother is stalling police investigators in her home."

The New Mayor of Chicago

CHICAGO - The competition for the seat being vacated by outgoing mayor Richard Daley was ended today after all but one of the field of candidates - including former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Rep. Danny Davis, James Meeks and others - were effectively crushed by Henry Buttons. "I am the Mayor!" roared Henry as he not only snuffed his rivals, but also began a massive urban planning project on the Near North Side.  From inside her cage near his left paw, his press secretary announced that his first initiative will be focused on reducing what he considers an "unacceptably high" pigeon population, then released video of his proposed techniques.

©2010 mark swindle | design-ia

State and federal officials have already assembled teams to make initial forays into diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation with this nemesis who, it seems, makes both the outgoing Mayor and his father appear, by comparison, as playful kittens. "He looks like a freakin' rattlesnake about to strike," remarked Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, "and we need to make sure he stays on our side. Recent restraints imposed on the military budget by the economic downturn make it impossible to mobilize sufficient resources for a three-pronged war. Until we have some sort of exit strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must not to muss his fur."

In other breaking news a giant rabbit was spotted off the coast of Massachusetts.

A Day of Thanks, Love, Eating and Sports

©2010 mark swindle | design-ia

Saint Viaud, Patron Saint of Smoking Architects

From The Saints series (shot in June, 2010, when Elisa Keir was coaxed out of hiding in New Mexico to come and play in Paris). For this still the sunlight bouncing off the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acts more like an "idea bubble" than as the halo it does in the others of this series. Years from now I think I'll look back on this as a portrait of Jean-Brice just as he's hitting his prime. He (and his work) are smokin'...yeah. Last week he had his first photo exhibition at Espace Commines.

A few strands of Elisa's hair are visible off to the lower left. I framed the image this way to add a little drama, suggesting the hidden elements just outside of the field of vision. And then you can wonder "Is Jean-Brice having other than angelic thoughts?"

The Lorax in Madagacar

Dr Seuss's fable on industrialization and ecological disaster features a smallish creature and the book's namesake, The Lorax, who "speaks for the trees, as they have no tongues." It's one thing - a very unpleasant thing - to imagine the world without trees, quite another to depict that world but somehow get across the fact the trees are missing. There's the Petrified Forest, of course. But somehow showing just a single scorched tree in an utterly barren landscape seemed to get the point across best; even the slope - suggesting either the tree being buried under windblown debris or a denuded landscape washing away adds to the visceral effect.

So that there's more of this (which isn't necessarily "vile and base")...and less of this.

Looking Into the Abyss

The sandstone to the left could almost be a vertical formation - which would then mean that the background would have to be a solid backdrop, a studio set. But, in fact, its taken peering over the edge of a bridge into the Colorado River just east of Lee's Ferry and Marble Canyon. What furthers the confusion is the way the the shadow along its left edge makes the sandbar seem to be lower than the water. The end result is abstraction: the photograph of a specific geographical locale dissolves into somewhat unrecognizable forms. You can see the sandbar just below the bridge by clicking here. It's hidden in shadow.

Architecture on Foot: Wild Cantilevers and Socialist/Utopian-inspired Housing

Kind of funny how when one design approach pops up in one locale (Amsterdam)...

...it can also be found in another (Berlin):

It's one thing to have a ridiculous cantilever - though neither of these approach that of The House on the Rock - but to my eye the bonus here is the off-angle, which separates it even more from the form beneath it.

An earlier hang-over example (from 1997) is MVRDV's WoZoCo (aka "The Oklahoma"), social housing for the elderly. Its cantilevers were of a more practical nature: by projecting volumes out over the street it became possible to increase the number of units in the building to what was required (100) without sacrificing the quality of interior space for the elderly: the initial design fell 13 units short.¹ Clever and cool. This Rotterdam-based firms seems to have cantilevers on the brain.

But by far my favorite example of social housing-with-cantilevers is the reknowned example, from the Amsterdam School of design, the worker's palace housing project from 1919, known as Het Schip ("The Ship"):

This was part of a Socialist-inspired movement to provide housing for the poorest of Amsterdam's residents. This is part of a half-dozen similar projects in an area along the bay to the northwest of Amsterdam's center. Looking at the work of the School one suspects there was some back-and-forth between Frank Lloyd Wright and members of the Amsterdam School; and that "Socialism" may not be the bad word here that it is in America.

Father-Daughter Duos

Tatum and Ryan O'Neal were paired together - in Paper Moon - as a con artist duo set in the Depression Era Midwest. Nicholas Cage shoots his filmic-daughter, Chloe Moretz, in the chest with a gun, training her to be a vigilante in the opening scenes of Kick-Ass; in a subsequent scene she hacks, stabs and kills 5 drug dealers before he picks off a sixth, sniper-style from a nearby rooftop where he watches her killings. Fabulously heart-warming antics, these father-daughter teams.

My favorite of late - Shane and Izzy:

Not to be outdone, my daughter and me when she was, oh, about 6, having her first cigarette:

Random Thoughts on Simultaneous Events: Naked in Erfurt

Movies like Babylon work toward the creation of a chain of causality by linking together events happening in different places and times. What if, instead, the linkage is of events happening in the same moment? Imagine, say, a project that collects video footage from the same minute of the same day from around the world, then splices these together..or has them playing simultaneously in a grid, as in 6 billion others.

This inspiration for this from a chance obersvation - from the Zitadelle Petersberg - of a statuesque woman perched on heels shedding her clothing then walking, with hula hoop, across the plaza where teens skateboarded, tourists peered down at the red-tiled roofs of Erfurt below, and a sudden tittering from tourists like me at the next table gave an alert of something non-ordinary going on below. Earlier in the day I'd passed the site of a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht. The profoundly different quality of these nearby (yet temporally different) events got me wondering " What else is going on around the world as I sit in relative safety watching a naked woman in a public space?" For example this testimony given as a relentless plume of oil - at the time estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day - billowed up from a puncture in the ocean floor. Or picture 4 from here showing Afghan boys doing wrestling training - though picture 2 of the burning oil tanker might have been taken just as easily on the same day.

Turned into a project: The presentation could range from between the extremes of documentary footage - perhaps displayed as a grid of 100 randomly-selected inputs of surveillance video - to an auteur selecting -  then editing - a melange of footage collected from a team of videographers assigned to significant locations around the Earth - i.e. the former being a random collection, the latter a staged collection. The point? Since it's easiest to fall back into thinking locally (in our own locale of experience), thinks that get us into a global perspective are pretty fasinating.

This is what a lot of organizations cash in on. Most of us would probably like to help someone in drought-stricken Africa have access to potable water, but we're not quite sure how to go abut it. Or we don't trust (and can't verify) that the money we cough off actually does any good, or that the agency is less than reputable. This mistrust is often justifed. Take, for example, Live Earth 2010, "which was built upon the belief that entertainment has the power to transcend social and cultural barriers to move the world community to action. The goal of the organization is to raise money to help finance water projects in developing countries." But...wait a minute...who's the sponsor? Dow Chemical! Hmm. Don't they own Union Carbide - you know, the Bhopal Disaster people? And don't they have 96 superfund sites in the US? What the f*** are they doing sponsoring a clean water running event?!

If I run this event again next year I'll do it carrying 10kg or so of water - to get the real feel of how it feels to someone who has to walk the distance every day. And perhaps without clothing - to get the feel of the woman in Erfurt.

That Damned Rabbit

Occasionally something sticks in your head and you can't get rid of it, "like a sore on the roof of your mouth that would heal if you could only stop tonguing it.¹" Like a bad pop song that, once you hear someone humming a few bars of it is in your head for the rest of your day...or life. Like that scary rabbit from Donnie Darko who appears as a colossus above the aspen groves of undisclosed locations in New Mexico, utterly shattering the calm magnificence of nature; or as if Godzilla, omniscient, rising above the waves in Normandie; morbidly appearing through the haze of Paris as a gossamer, polluted Anti-Christ or - showing no partiality to one religion or another - as the right hand of wrath waiting for the infidels to pour forth from Hagia Sophia. He/it's not going away anytime soon, I fear.

Apocalyptic Imagery: Dying Sun, Power Plant and Molten Lead Sea

Taken on the ferry to the NDSM (where I now have a studio) with a North Sea storm giving a brief lull before sunset. The smokestack and silhouette of the industrial landscape set the mood, the sun is rendered as if going down - or exploding in a nuclear fireball - for the last time, and the impenetrability of the water completes this alien landscape. It connoted the scene from HG Wells "The Time Machine" when - after venturing an unfathomable distance (30 million years) into the future - the time traveler arrives on the edge of a boiling ocean of the dying planet. All that's missing is the hiss of the water and the tentacles of a beast breaking the surface of the water, right?

Using Myshkin - a Sony DSC-T100 which now suffers from seizures and dropout - I jacked the light level way down to get the unnaturally dark feel since what I wanted was the solidity of the water, the silhouette, the plume and not much other detail.

Photos from undisclosed locations: waterfall

This required some tricky climbing to get into a position where i could peer down through a crevasse and see both the falling water and the pool below. The deliciousness of the water – after scampering through the dryness of a canyon and running low on drinking water – was what fed the framing and lighting: the way the water glistens on the sunlit rock makes it look so wet – and the greenness of the pool below becomes irresistible.