He's a professional photographer, these are all his
I like seeing the results of his approach to photography.
I'm used to thinking of photographs as a way of capturing the world out there.
You see something beautiful, you take a beautiful picture, you take the beautiful home with you.
A photograph is just a way of saving a view or an experience for later.
Watching Derek, though, I was struck by how little straight-up capturing he did.
We biked right past sunsets and churches without stopping.
I think good photographers are probably more interested in creating.
Rather than finding.
In the last two years, I've almost completely given up on reading fiction.
As I get more interested in abstract representations in images, I've almost completely given up on them in books.
Film is truth 24 times a second, says the old cliche.
But that's exactly false. Every photo is a lie. You're taking a tiny slice of an experience, then inviting the viewer to blow it back up to reality size.
There could be a fucking stegosaurus just outside the frame of this photo, and the viewer would never know.
Literature is a lie too, but at least it's more obvious.
The stegosaurus is still there, but you can't take it home with you.
This slight bump in the horizon is the highest point in Berlin
It's called The Devil's Mountain, and it's made of rubble cleared from the city after World War II
It's also the site of an old American listening station that has been abandoned since the end of the Cold War
This is where the Yanks eavesdropped on military dispatches from Moscow, Warsaw and Prague
After a few aborted attempts to preserve or develop it, it's now just sort of there
It's technically closed to the public, but there are holes in the fence the size of Volkswagens, and dozens of people milling about inside.
All the domes are accessible
The acoustics are incredible. There's no such thing as whispering in these things.
It's been denuded of all of its equipment and Cold War-iphernalia years ago, but the structures are the same as they always were.
If this was America, someone would have twisted an ankle and sued the city by now.
But here, there's evidence of people picnicing and camping
Between 1961 and 1989, this would have been one of the few places you could have see 360 degrees of East Germany from within West Berlin.
And it was only open to American military personnel anyway.
It's funny how a major component of the fun of visiting site is the fact that it's officially forbidden.
If this had been developed as a tourist site, you would be there as a guest, rather than an interloper.
I wonder how many other things I enjoy primarily because they're off-limits
Derek's a professional photographer, so he knows what he's doing. That lens!
Here's the Corbusier building that I'm supposed to, like, fall on my knees worshipping because it's so significant and so pomo and the trim and the balconies and the mmmmnnnnnn god it's so amazing
But I'll take the view from the other side any day.
Derek has a wide-angle lens!
From on top of the pile of rubble, you can see Potsdam. And a few hills that are supposed to be there.
The Pruitt-Igoe housing project consisted of 33 eleven-story buildings in inner St. Louis. Its residents were exclusively black and low-income, the remnants of a major slum-clearance effort after World War II. The project was built quickly, with a relatively small budget, and included some architectural innovations like elevators that only stopped every three floors and ‘galleries’ where residents could hang out and get to know each other.
The rest of the story is familiar to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with American urban policy in the last four decades. As inner-city residents increasingly moved out to the suburbs, demand for project-housing plummeted, and the tower blocks steadily emptied until only the poorest, least mobile and unemployed-est residents remained.
Since its demolition in 1972, Pruitt-Igoe has become shorthand for socially pioneering architects building public housing totally out of sync with the needs of residents. Pruitt-Igoe’s long corridors and forced-hangout spaces became mugging spots. The ‘open plan’ lobbies allowed people to enter the buildings who didn’t live there, which lessened residents’ feeling of ownership over the buildings.
That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. This article is a fascinating unpacking of this myth, and shos that the architects, far from being social crusaders or blind to residents’ needs, were simply so constrained by the site, necessities and budget of the project that they had no ability to construct decent living spaces.
It was the city’s decision to concentrate its poorest residents in tower blocks, the city’s decision to underfund construction materials and consultation, the city’s decision to neglect maintenance, the city’s decision to fail to implement education or jobs programs for Pruitt-Igoe residents.
In other words, the Pruitt-Igoe projects didn’t fail because they were poorly designed, they failed because they were poorly conceived.
Pruitt-Igoe was shaped by the strategies of ghetto containment and inner-city revitalization—strategies that did not emanate from the architects, but rather from the system in which they practice. The Pruitt-Igoe myth therefore not only inflates the power of the architect to effect social change, but it masks the extent to which the profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures and practices that it is powerless to change.
Simultaneously with its function of promoting the power of the architect, the myth serves to disguise the actual purpose and implication of public housing by diverting the debate to the question of design. By continuing to promote architectural solutions to what are fundamentally problems of class and race, the myth conceals the complete inadequacy of contemporary public housing policy. It has quite usefully shifted the blame from the sources of housing policy and placed it on the design professions.
By furthering this misconception, the myth disguises the causes of the failure of public housing, and also ensures the continued participation of the architecture profession in token and palliative efforts to address the problem of poverty inAmerica. The myth is a mystification that benefits everyone involved, except those to whom public housing programs are supposedly directed.
Last night during All The President’s Men, I found this out:
Woodward wrote that he first met Felt by chance in 1970, when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties who was dispatched to deliver a package to the White House’s West Wing. Felt arrived soon after, for a separate appointment, and sat next to Woodward in the waiting room. Woodward struck up a conversation, eventually learning of Felt’s position in the upper echelon of the FBI. Woodward, who was about to get out of the Navy at the time and was unsure about his future direction in life, became determined to use Felt as a mentor and career advisor, and so he got Felt’s phone number and kept in touch with him.
This is the best argument in favor of chitchat I’ve ever heard.
“My mother told me that the positions they do are all just for show,” he says. Rückert explained to her son that he shouldn’t worry if his first girlfriend didn’t moan loudly during sex and that the actors in porn movies use lots of lubrication.
Last week in Albania I stumbled across a street fair sponsored by the US government.
There were a bunch of stalls, each displaying activities by a different department.
And an Albanian band doing covers of Adele songs
It was weird. Doesn't America has better things to do with its largesse than serve hotdogs? And doesn't Albania have bigger problems than recreational drug use?
Either way, if USAID wants to have any impact, it should probably try making some signs in Albanian.
I went to the doctor as soon as I got back from Albania.
Me: I think I need a cast of some kind.
Doctor: What’s the problem?
Me: I have pretty bad foot pain. I’m pretty sure I have a metatarsal stress fracture. I can barely walk.
Doctor: Who diagnosed you with the metatarsal stress fracture?
Me: I’ve just been looking around on the internet, and that’s what it most sounds like.
Doctor: Well, I don’t think you have a stress fracture. So, who are you going to trust? Me, or Doctor Internet?
Me: What do you think I have?
Doctor: Foot pain.
Me: … Wait, is that the diagnosis? That’s my symptom. Are you allowed to do that?
I’m getting orthopedic shoe inserts today. And buying the URL for doctor-internet.com.
There's a mountain just outside of Tirana where you can gondola up to the top.
Like everything else in Albania, it was basically deserted. I had my own gondola!
You see these bunkers all over Albania. The former dictator, Enver Hoxha, built thousands of them for the inevitable (ha) Western invasion.
There were some abandoned ... radio sheds? I have no idea what these are.
There was no one manning them, or telling me not to poke around.
I don't know why Tirana is where it is. It's not on the water or near any resources, it's just sort of plopped in the knuckles of a bunch of mountains.
Apparently Albania has oodles of regional diversity, which is impressive considering it's basically the size of Rhode Island.
I imagine it was easier to get lost up here before there was a gondola.
I’m amazed this isn’t known and discussed more broadly:
[In Australia] the poorest 20 per cent of the population receives nearly 42 per cent of all the money spent on social security; the richest 20 per cent receives only around 3 per cent. As a result, the poorest fifth receives twelve times as much in social benefits as the richest fifth, while in the United States the poorest get about one and a half times as much as the richest. At the furthest extreme are countries like Greece, where the rich are paid twice as much in benefits as the poorest 20 per cent, and Mexico and Turkey, where the rich receive five to ten times as much as the poor.
You can have arguments about whether the welfare state should exist, but if it does, it should be geared toward helping the poorest first (right?!).
I had never been to Macedonia before, so after Albania, I popped over to Lake Ohrid for the day.
It's the deepest--and coldest--lake in the Balkans, so I never actually swam. I spent most of my time taking pictures of it.
And yeah feeling pretty park-benchy taking this, but the kid's dad said it was OK.
I still couldn't walk, so I biked up and down the lakeshore for 15 or 20 kilometers
Based on my limited experience, I've concluded that Macedonia is just like Switzerland, only interesting.
I mean, look at this shit! I'm barely trying, and it still looks like a fucking pre-installed Windows desktop
Alright, these are getting boring now.
Yep, once I start pretending I know what I'm doing with my camera, you know it's getting repetitive.
Jesus, this one's even worse. I was on my balcony watching the sunset and listening to a podcast. I had to do something with my hands, and my camera was the nearest victim.
Please. This is just too fucking easy now.
OK, this one looks the same, but it's actually 5.45 the next morning. I got up for the sunrise! Me and the fishermen were the only people to see this.
Finally, a photo without the lake in it. Geez.
Nope, there it is again.
Why am I standing next to a pitchfork?!
I was excited at the time about the sun finally clearing the mountains, but here it just looks Photoshopped.
People live in this country! Oh huh.
Macedonians are Orthodox right? Orthodox muslims? Wait.
This isn't a great photo, but I took this from a moving car, and I'm hella self-proud of timing it right with the sun.
OK, this one's obviously out the bus window. But there were lots of cute abandoned buildings out there.
Sigh. Meanwhile, back at the lake.
Aw shit, he went macro on that ass. I think I was just excited to have found some genuine flora. Everything else was basically just scrub.
The bike ride back. I'm obviously counting down to leaving now.
It's still riding off into the sunset if you're on a rented girls' bike, right?
In the documentary Casino Jack, they tell the story of Saipan, a US protectorate where a bunch of clothing companies set up sweatshops so they could keep the ‘Made in USA’ label. Terrible working conditions, long hours, third-world pay, blah blah blah.
According to the documentary, the primary strategy for keeping all of this legal was to fly senators out to the island itself for ‘fact-finding’ missions. The government of Saipan would stage-manage ‘impromptu’ tours of factories and meetings with fake workers’ representatives. When the senators got back to the US and were confronted with NGO reports about the terrible working conditions, their response was ‘that’s not true. I’ve been there and it’s not like that.’
Visiting Saipan didn’t give them any new information. It simply increased their confidence in their own expertise.
Sometimes I feel like this when I travel.
I was in Albania this week, and spent five days basically spectating it. I walked around the capital. I biked to some smaller cities. I bussed across the border to Macedonia. I trained to the Aegean coast.
Fine. I had a blast. But what I always struggle with on these trips is the urge to turn my incredibly limited experience into a generalization.
I walk around Tirana and I see hundreds of bustling cafes, filled with Ray Banned young people. The cars are new-looking. Construction workers are construction-working to fix potholes and repave sidewalks.
All of this means that Albania is not only a middle-income country, but firmly on its way to high-income status and EU membership, right? There’s a Gucci store, for Christ’s sake.
Albania’s per capita GDP is $6,000, one of the lowest in Europe. The unemployment rate is upwards of 15 percent, and the only reliable money coming into the country is from Albanians who have emigrated to Greece and Italy for low-skilled labour.
Aside from that specific splash of water, there’s the broader point that aimlessly walking around a country ‘s capital is a fucking terrible way to determine its level of development. I don’t speak Albanian. I can’t read Albanian newspapers or speak to people who know the country intimately. Basically, I have no ability to gather factual information. Experiencing the ‘feel’ of a foreign country is just another way of saying that you’re filtering your stereotypes through your observations.
This is obvious, of course, but it’s a hard impulse to resist. Just being someplace isn’t a remotely reliable way to gather systematic information about it. But it’s a great way to make you think you know what you’re talking about.
This is a nice post summarizing the arguments for and against Britain joining the Euro in 2001:
The arguments in favour, at least the economic ones, were that we might benefit from being fully integrated in a bigger trading bloc, that we would benefit from currency stability, that lower interest rates would be nice to have, and that the Eurozone restrictions would be a force that would require industry to be more competitive (or did they just mean lower wages?). The arguments against, at least the economic ones, were that the Stability & Growth Pact would be an anti-Keynesian force for deflation and that the option of devaluation would be removed. […]
But the economic argument that was very rarely discussed was the one that is now fascinating everybody – exactly how the Eurosystem, rather than the Euro, would function in a financial crisis. Apparently this was discussed in specialist circles, but it didn’t make even the best of the national press.
Maybe this is just me and my fetish for obsolete political debates, but I wish the media would engage in this exercise more often. If there’s anything history teaches us, its that the arguments for and against making a particular political move are often utterly irrelevant once the action is taken.
People opposed to giving women the vote in Britain in 1918, for example,made the argument that, once you had universal suffrage, there would be no impartial observers to serve as referees in political debates. It may be true that women’s suffrage slightly reduced the number of female-brokered political compromises, but if you were listing all the positive and negative impacts of universal suffrage 90 years after the fact, that would come in about 107th. Similarly, the arguments for and against the creation of the Euro from 2000 seem completely out of touch with its actual impact in 2011.
One of the roles of new media, I think, will be to run more postgame analysis like this. With all of our political arguments cached in full, we can’t escape the reasons we talked ourselves into tacking in a particular direction, and how those reasons relate to what has happened since. Things like, say, the Bush tax cuts and healthcare reform were designed to foster specific economic and societal impacts. If those impacts haven’t taken effect in the years since, the people designing them were either lying, grandstanding, shortsighted or just wrong. For each reason behind their decision, we need to ask them which one they were.
We need a media that not only holds politicians to account for what they do, but why they do it. Knowing what we were promised and what we got won’t just make us better debaters, but better citizens.
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