Archive for amerika
April 10, 2008 at 8:23 am · tag/s : amerika, australia, death, life, loss, love, people
a story is doing the rounds of the internets about an 80 year old man in new york who has been calling his late wife’s answering service every day since she died in 2005 just to hear her voice. unfortunately the phone company deleted the message and the old man was heartbroken. tough shit said verizon when he rang them asking if they could restore the message. then the story hit the internets and hey presto, the phone company found a backup of the message and restored it. where there is a will (or a potential public relations disaster) there is a way. there are a number of variants of the story, some of which claim the voice said : “the whitings aren’t home…” and in others “this is catherine whiting…” but no matter it is a great story. how long before there is service where you can record a message before you die so people can ring a number and hear your voice after you have passed away?
December 5, 2007 at 8:09 am · tag/s : amerika, image, life, people
cue : a random post about two sets of photographs of people : one - the life’s work of the german photographer august sander (1876-1964) currently the subject of a major exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales which contains a sizeable portion of the 1200 of his photographs owned by the j.paul getty museum - for obvious reasons these were interesting times for a german photographer to be plying his trade although the allies made a significant dent in his legacy when 30,000 of his negatives were destroyed during the bombing of cologne - call me old fashioned but this is a refreshingly sober hang too, the curator having chosen not to be creative and to simply exhibit the photographs at eye height, equidistantly spaced in plain black frames. here are a few nice examples of sander’s work i found on the net.
two - portraits by the anonymous officials of us law enforcement agencies of arrested people wearing t-shirts with slogans. i think they are meant to be funny, but mostly they just made me sad.
November 13, 2007 at 6:50 am · tag/s : amerika, australia, love
here is one for your fuck off pocket :
They had made fleeting eye contact and then she disappeared. It was visceral, inexplicable, something beyond words. Little wonder the romantics were quivering.
what a load of bollix. she didn’t even notice him. but it certainly seems that it was beyond words if the quality of the writing is anything to go by.
but what is it about the ‘quality press’ in late capitalism that a story like this gets picked up? or more specifically : what is it about the desperado hacks at the age? was it the fact that “the pair” appeared on good morning amerika? maybe this is what made it newsworthy?
April 17, 2007 at 5:39 am · tag/s : amerika, art, death, pain, people
despite a whole melatonin i wake very early from a very strong vivid dream about my friend simone who teaches at virginia technical university in the usa and i can’t get back to sleep : it is before 5am, i am still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when i see the surreal news headline on the net : 32 dead people … 32 people who got “what they obviously did not deserve…” in the words of one witness
and the people who were wounded jumping out of windows didn’t deserve it either.
nor did the people who were scared out of their wits. or those who have lost friends or family.
and neither did any of the people of blacksburg and the students and staff at virginia tech, who were without any exception, amongst the most friendly and civilized people i have met, when i was a guest lecturer there in december 2006.
in my dream we are arguing about art, as usual, whilst the tragedy which is the real world continues to happen all around us.
