i found out about it not more than a year and a half ago. it's by henri cartier-bresson. am not even sure i really knew any of his pictures before. anyway. fell in love with it, instantly. he was my age when he took it. 1933.
Monday, March 31, 2008
there's this photo that i love
i found out about it not more than a year and a half ago. it's by henri cartier-bresson. am not even sure i really knew any of his pictures before. anyway. fell in love with it, instantly. he was my age when he took it. 1933.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
(wor)shipping go(o)ds
if entering any kind of store and browsing amongst the labels of all the products lying on the shelves is still not enough to make a bell ring into our minds, passing through a harbour will do the job. there are no other places on earth where to realise the enormity of global trade.
goods go round our world, goods make our world go round. even when we decide to ignore about that, to ignore about them. as trivial as it may be, they end up being our idols, we end up worshipping them. and harbours are the temples of this new, blind religion we're trapped into.
we can be bad devotees, we may even forget about the religious practice, but no matter how much we deny our gods, they won't cease existing and permeating our lives.
a quick visit to one of the largest cathedrals in the world is enough to remind us about that. like the harbour in hamburg, where i was recently and took these shots.
simply huge. no words.
goods go round our world, goods make our world go round. even when we decide to ignore about that, to ignore about them. as trivial as it may be, they end up being our idols, we end up worshipping them. and harbours are the temples of this new, blind religion we're trapped into.
we can be bad devotees, we may even forget about the religious practice, but no matter how much we deny our gods, they won't cease existing and permeating our lives.
a quick visit to one of the largest cathedrals in the world is enough to remind us about that. like the harbour in hamburg, where i was recently and took these shots.
simply huge. no words.Monday, March 17, 2008
a present
today it's my friend enrica's birthday, and although i can't really afford to get her this nice photo we saw in dublin, i'm sure she'll be happy to see this tiny version anyway!especially because i had to write an embarrassing email to the guy who runs the gallery (thanks dave!) to find out who shot it... but was totally worthy, now i know his name is lawrence schiller and he's a photographer and director and producer and writer (enri, anything else??)
anyway
happy birthday enrica
waiting to see your photos in a gallery
Sunday, March 16, 2008
i'll have a draught... milk
i just read that in some places in italy they started selling milk from a tap: you have to take along your own bottle!
and the same is happening for soap and detergent!
that's simply fantastic! it's a great starting point to get rid of all the useless disposable crap that without request fill our houses (and our lives...)
i hope it spreads as largely and as soon as possible!
what do i have to do it to have it in my own city??
for more info (in italian)
image from the Oxfam campaign "Make Trade Fair"
and the same is happening for soap and detergent!
that's simply fantastic! it's a great starting point to get rid of all the useless disposable crap that without request fill our houses (and our lives...)
i hope it spreads as largely and as soon as possible!
what do i have to do it to have it in my own city??
for more info (in italian)
image from the Oxfam campaign "Make Trade Fair"
Saturday, March 08, 2008
how would you translate "termovalorizzatore"?
back on the waste topic...
i have translated a WU MING article about the ambiguous use of words and euphemisms in information and mass communication media. especially about the word "termovalorizzatore", which cannot really be translated because i believe such a word, such an euphemism has only been used in Italy. In the rest of the world, the simple word "burning plant" or "incinerator" is used. Because the role of such plants is to get rid of waste, and a (pretty expensive and note very sustainable) by product is the production of energy. Makes sense, if we still agree that the name of something should define its (main) purpose.
Throughout Europe, burning plants are governed by laws about waste; in Italy, by laws about energy, and this energy is considered "clean". aha. which basically means you get state funding for doing that, funding which should go to solar energy and all the clean clean stuff (something called "Energia CIP 6"). That's why incinerators are not called by their real name, but a fictitious, distorted reality is created around them and around the fake name “termovalorizzatore”: could be translated as “producer of increased value (=energy) via thermal process”. How else would you translate it?? any help is welcome :)
I already mentioned this article a while ago, in one of my january posts, but what really pushed me to translate it is that, while electioneering, some italian party wrote on their program "we shall call things by their name: e.g. termovalorizzatori" and this really made me angry because the whole point of this name is just the opposite!
So if you accept the idea that the title is un-translatable (and if you're Italian, please help me!) then here's the article:
LET US… (TERMOVALORIZZIAMOCI)
“The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them […] The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. [...] No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean.”
- “The Principles of Newspeak”, Appendix to 1984, George Orwell
Euphemisms kill people. They kill your mother, destroy your son, devour grownups and children. Euphemisms scrabble the inside of esophagus and lungs. Euphemisms are cancer, they spread metastases like spider webs, they grab words and strangle your intelligence until they make you die. Literally die.
Endlösung, “final solution”, was the masterpiece of all euphemisms. As time went by, it has lost its outer layer of prudence and hypocrisy, and melted into the vile reality it was intended to mask out. Euphemisms work pretty well on short-medium time scales, then they cease to be what they are. After a few years, nobody uses the term “humanitarian war”, nobody boasts “surgical bombings” using “smart bombs” anymore, even “collateral damage” fell into disuse. Those terms have now the negative meaning they were supposed to avoid with their creation.
“Thermo...” instead than “incinerator”. By coining the new term, the accent has been removed from the thing which certainly remains (toxic residual: 1/5 of waste, without taking into account the fumes produced by the combustion process) to that which is presumably produced (a value, energy, economic gain). Those who say “No to the thermo…!” have already lost, because they have accepted the euphemism, the frame. They argue on the opponent’s ground, and apparently they fight against a value, against something “good”.
“Thermo… are the solution”: they repeat it, sing it in choirs, iterate it as a hammer, they all agree while erecting the great wall of conformism on the waste topic. All the official voices coincide. One might wonder why, in the end, people don’t listen, why they don’t obey.
Incinerators. A process based on an obsolete principle, which goes back to a time when “mini-checks” (checks corresponding to small amounts of money, with the same value of coins, which were emitted by Italian banks at the end of the 70s) were circulating and Bill Gates was poor. A technology which is as old as the neural cells of this nation, old but still with stains of make up on the chin, as the mugs of the caste and the horrible intellectual class in Italy are.
Good broth is made with old technology. And allergies, breathing diseases, tumors. Social expenses. Health bills rising up to the sky. An energy devouring machine, karma wheel of vicious circles, which must always work, without rest, stimulating waste production with its own existence. Waste has become the means, the incinerator is the end.
There exist alternative solutions. Concrete. Feasible. Already used (elsewhere). Few people talk about them [*]. Not even these people represent the endlösung to the waste problem, though.
The “final solution” would be, simply, to produce less waste. To produce less disposable crap. Produce less, use more. We already wrote about that: link --> there is no “fair” way to produce useless stuff.
We are the problem, not the waste. We are the problem, not the Camorra. Or, we are the Camorra. The discussion about the ”ecomafie” (criminal activities and organizations against the environment) are true and necessary, but risk to turn into a diversion. We are all environmental criminals, some of us more and some other less. Our life style is environmentally criminal, consumption for its own sake is a crime against the environment. There is no Camorra able to get rid or to illegally dispose of non-produced waste, but we do produce waste, and always more. In Italy, we had an increase of +20% in urban waste per person, from 2003 to 2005.
And we find ourselves with more packaging, more plastic bags, more wrapping, more boxes and jars and bins and cartons, more flasks, more tubes, more senseless gadgets, more cell phones, video phones, tv-phones to be changed every six months, more instant-books written by comedians which become old in one month and they were not even funny in the first place, more paper tissues and paper napkins (use a handkerchief for god’s sake!), more mailboxes stuffed with tens of huge pamphlets of shopping centres, more bottles, huge bottles of mineral water even where the aqueduct performs a miracle and gold comes out of the tap, “well, but the water I buy is hyposodic!”, yes, and half hour later you’re drinking gatorade or energade or powerade, because you’re an idiot!
Everything comes back to you, you harvest what you seed. Consume, dissipate, waste, destroy, throw away. Your polymeric shit will burn (or better: it will be “thermo...”), while your beloved ones (or somebody else’s) will inhale, metastasis, metastasis, metastasis, tumor.
Let us "thermo…" ourselves, let us play with words, this is the way, the path of the future behind our backs.
Alternatively, there is another way: to "thermo…" those who govern us, who hypnotize us, who exploit, buy and sell us, those who consume us.
THE END
I am not sure if it was clear enough, anyway i repeat it: this is just the translation of an issue from wu ming's newsletter "Giap". here you can find the original version (for lazy italians...)
i have translated a WU MING article about the ambiguous use of words and euphemisms in information and mass communication media. especially about the word "termovalorizzatore", which cannot really be translated because i believe such a word, such an euphemism has only been used in Italy. In the rest of the world, the simple word "burning plant" or "incinerator" is used. Because the role of such plants is to get rid of waste, and a (pretty expensive and note very sustainable) by product is the production of energy. Makes sense, if we still agree that the name of something should define its (main) purpose.
Throughout Europe, burning plants are governed by laws about waste; in Italy, by laws about energy, and this energy is considered "clean". aha. which basically means you get state funding for doing that, funding which should go to solar energy and all the clean clean stuff (something called "Energia CIP 6"). That's why incinerators are not called by their real name, but a fictitious, distorted reality is created around them and around the fake name “termovalorizzatore”: could be translated as “producer of increased value (=energy) via thermal process”. How else would you translate it?? any help is welcome :)
I already mentioned this article a while ago, in one of my january posts, but what really pushed me to translate it is that, while electioneering, some italian party wrote on their program "we shall call things by their name: e.g. termovalorizzatori" and this really made me angry because the whole point of this name is just the opposite!
So if you accept the idea that the title is un-translatable (and if you're Italian, please help me!) then here's the article:
LET US… (TERMOVALORIZZIAMOCI)
“The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them […] The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. [...] No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean.”
- “The Principles of Newspeak”, Appendix to 1984, George Orwell
Euphemisms kill people. They kill your mother, destroy your son, devour grownups and children. Euphemisms scrabble the inside of esophagus and lungs. Euphemisms are cancer, they spread metastases like spider webs, they grab words and strangle your intelligence until they make you die. Literally die.
Endlösung, “final solution”, was the masterpiece of all euphemisms. As time went by, it has lost its outer layer of prudence and hypocrisy, and melted into the vile reality it was intended to mask out. Euphemisms work pretty well on short-medium time scales, then they cease to be what they are. After a few years, nobody uses the term “humanitarian war”, nobody boasts “surgical bombings” using “smart bombs” anymore, even “collateral damage” fell into disuse. Those terms have now the negative meaning they were supposed to avoid with their creation.
“Thermo...” instead than “incinerator”. By coining the new term, the accent has been removed from the thing which certainly remains (toxic residual: 1/5 of waste, without taking into account the fumes produced by the combustion process) to that which is presumably produced (a value, energy, economic gain). Those who say “No to the thermo…!” have already lost, because they have accepted the euphemism, the frame. They argue on the opponent’s ground, and apparently they fight against a value, against something “good”.
“Thermo… are the solution”: they repeat it, sing it in choirs, iterate it as a hammer, they all agree while erecting the great wall of conformism on the waste topic. All the official voices coincide. One might wonder why, in the end, people don’t listen, why they don’t obey.
Incinerators. A process based on an obsolete principle, which goes back to a time when “mini-checks” (checks corresponding to small amounts of money, with the same value of coins, which were emitted by Italian banks at the end of the 70s) were circulating and Bill Gates was poor. A technology which is as old as the neural cells of this nation, old but still with stains of make up on the chin, as the mugs of the caste and the horrible intellectual class in Italy are.
Good broth is made with old technology. And allergies, breathing diseases, tumors. Social expenses. Health bills rising up to the sky. An energy devouring machine, karma wheel of vicious circles, which must always work, without rest, stimulating waste production with its own existence. Waste has become the means, the incinerator is the end.
There exist alternative solutions. Concrete. Feasible. Already used (elsewhere). Few people talk about them [*]. Not even these people represent the endlösung to the waste problem, though.
The “final solution” would be, simply, to produce less waste. To produce less disposable crap. Produce less, use more. We already wrote about that: link --> there is no “fair” way to produce useless stuff.
We are the problem, not the waste. We are the problem, not the Camorra. Or, we are the Camorra. The discussion about the ”ecomafie” (criminal activities and organizations against the environment) are true and necessary, but risk to turn into a diversion. We are all environmental criminals, some of us more and some other less. Our life style is environmentally criminal, consumption for its own sake is a crime against the environment. There is no Camorra able to get rid or to illegally dispose of non-produced waste, but we do produce waste, and always more. In Italy, we had an increase of +20% in urban waste per person, from 2003 to 2005.
And we find ourselves with more packaging, more plastic bags, more wrapping, more boxes and jars and bins and cartons, more flasks, more tubes, more senseless gadgets, more cell phones, video phones, tv-phones to be changed every six months, more instant-books written by comedians which become old in one month and they were not even funny in the first place, more paper tissues and paper napkins (use a handkerchief for god’s sake!), more mailboxes stuffed with tens of huge pamphlets of shopping centres, more bottles, huge bottles of mineral water even where the aqueduct performs a miracle and gold comes out of the tap, “well, but the water I buy is hyposodic!”, yes, and half hour later you’re drinking gatorade or energade or powerade, because you’re an idiot!
Everything comes back to you, you harvest what you seed. Consume, dissipate, waste, destroy, throw away. Your polymeric shit will burn (or better: it will be “thermo...”), while your beloved ones (or somebody else’s) will inhale, metastasis, metastasis, metastasis, tumor.
Let us "thermo…" ourselves, let us play with words, this is the way, the path of the future behind our backs.
Alternatively, there is another way: to "thermo…" those who govern us, who hypnotize us, who exploit, buy and sell us, those who consume us.
THE END
I am not sure if it was clear enough, anyway i repeat it: this is just the translation of an issue from wu ming's newsletter "Giap". here you can find the original version (for lazy italians...)
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
looking for the heart of any night
i shouldn't have read that sentence. not now, now that i'm thinking all the time about what i should do next and where. and why. i shouldn't have read that sentence someone said about never getting a day job. a non creative job, i guess he meant, a regular, cubicle job. nothing wrong with that. just maybe a feeling that something might be missing subtly starts scaring you, and you pull night after night trying to pursue that something, because if you didn't you'd feel you're missing a chance. but in the meanwhile you're missing the big picture, you're losing perspective. you're losing interest in what's important, what should be important, what you thought all the time should be. what if it's not? but what if it is...
check the time, it's late, it's true, but you can't do both at the same time. you're awake now, but you also like to sleep. a lot.
check the time, it's late, it's true, but you can't do both at the same time. you're awake now, but you also like to sleep. a lot.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
looking for tom's picture
since i was in dublin a couple of months ago, i've been looking for a picture of tom waits that i saw in a gallery in which we bumped into just by chance... it was full of pictures of musicians, and there were two nice shots of tom taken during a gig in london years ago... so i started looking for those pictures, a while ago, but i didn't remember the name of the gallery. thanks to google, you start typing "photo tom waits" and something else and you find tons of stuff... for example this nice picture by a deborah chesher, 
who apparently was active as a rock and roll photographer back then (check her blog, even though the title's pretty scary...)
not the one i was looking for, but still cool, look at the smoke! which by the way one can also purchase as a poster as well... but still, not really my picture.
then i start googling for "dublin photo gallery whatever" and finally i end up in the website of the gallery (www.gallerynumberone.com) which at the time was not so updated... so the only thing i found out was that the guy whose photos were hanging there when i happened to be in the gallery is a certain david corio,
and apparently he shot this very famous one which you can find almost everywhere... and i almost convinced myself that the picture i liked so much was this one, which is very pretty anyway. but i was not sure, at least i didn't remember why i really liked it. i mean, it's nice the way the hands reflect the light and everything, but still.
so after i while i check the website again, and now it's updated, and full of pictures, to buy too, if you have that money and wish to spend them on a photograph... and i find other pictures of tom, still by corio, nice pictures in the dark (i wish i could shoot in the dark some day) but still don't tell me much.
and then finally, if you have survived alive until the end of this post, here it is, the picture i was looking for, and why did i really like it? it's plain, simple, won't say much to a lot of people, but me, i've never been to his concerts, and he doesn't really seem keen on doing any soon, so i have to imagine how it is, and that's almost exactly how i imagine it would be...
and still it's nice to imagine, but with a soundtrack it's better...
who apparently was active as a rock and roll photographer back then (check her blog, even though the title's pretty scary...)not the one i was looking for, but still cool, look at the smoke! which by the way one can also purchase as a poster as well... but still, not really my picture.
then i start googling for "dublin photo gallery whatever" and finally i end up in the website of the gallery (www.gallerynumberone.com) which at the time was not so updated... so the only thing i found out was that the guy whose photos were hanging there when i happened to be in the gallery is a certain david corio,
and apparently he shot this very famous one which you can find almost everywhere... and i almost convinced myself that the picture i liked so much was this one, which is very pretty anyway. but i was not sure, at least i didn't remember why i really liked it. i mean, it's nice the way the hands reflect the light and everything, but still.so after i while i check the website again, and now it's updated, and full of pictures, to buy too, if you have that money and wish to spend them on a photograph... and i find other pictures of tom, still by corio, nice pictures in the dark (i wish i could shoot in the dark some day) but still don't tell me much.
and then finally, if you have survived alive until the end of this post, here it is, the picture i was looking for, and why did i really like it? it's plain, simple, won't say much to a lot of people, but me, i've never been to his concerts, and he doesn't really seem keen on doing any soon, so i have to imagine how it is, and that's almost exactly how i imagine it would be...and still it's nice to imagine, but with a soundtrack it's better...
'night
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