v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Dan Biferie

Dan Biferie says at Zone Zero:

One of the biggest challenges I have found in digital imaging is to practice restraint. It is so easy to be seduced by the filters and effects the computer offers you and to go too far. I want to have one foot clearly in traditional photography so that the work maintains believability, but has shades of incongruity that make you realize it is not real.

My digital images are intended to be viewed as finished prints and directly on the computer's screen. After years of producing archival exhibition photographs, I find myself filled with renewed passion as my work, in its most transient form, travels across the Internet as an electronic image.

Jiri Sigut

Brzeg93

Charles Olson

Charles Olson in Hayfields, 1945 from Photographs of Charles Olson

Bet

It was herself which was my joy, she was
spirit before I had any, she was my nature until
I opened the book of nature and was denied the
heaven of the intellect having had the other three.      

And my soul said
you can't go there

To this I owe my life and I pay here my memory of her
who was Elizabeth and I called Bet.

Charles Olson

 

slumbering until nightfall

From Entropy and Me, a blog by Halvard Johnson, Works in progress 29 :

16.
fighting the high cost of prescription meditations
comparing the works of Proust, Gide, and Sartre
putting something aside for a rainy day
asking for another user's name and password

17.
scanning the shelves for news
cleaning up after the latest tsunami
taking care of our parents
looking forward to end-of-life decisions

18.
reassessing works already completed
exterminating the brutes
removing the snow from the car
rebuilding the old road from Fredrikstad to Skjeberg

5 Star Hotel

From Treasure of Baghdad, an Iraqi blog, you get a good sense for how out of synch things really are in Baghdad-once you get through the daily car bombings what is the newly "elected" democratic government doing to improve the lives of its citizens? Five star hotels!:

Isn't that ridiculous? What does it mean to spend millions of dollars in a place where no Iraqis can go? If someone gets married and wants to spend few nights at this 5- star hotel, he should get the permission first from the Americans and maybe they would give him a special badge just like others who work inside the fortified Zone. Why did Jafari approve spending millions of dollars on something that would not be used by Iraqi citizens? Didn't he think of the destruction that happened and still happening to Baghdad and Iraqi cities in general? Didn't he think that there are several 5-star hotels in Baghdad that need to be rehabilitated and make the people enjoy going to them? Didn’t he think of the jobless people who are supposed to build their country outside the Green Zone instead of building a fancy hotel for westerners only inside it? Didn't he think that this will hurt the feeling of the Iraqi people when they see they will be deprived from something built by their own money? I just want to understand, why doesn't he think of all of that?

A friend of mine, who works at the ministry of immigrants and displaced, told me that the Council of Ministers rejected donating the ministry which is supposed to provide the refugees of Tal Afar with food and tents. Consequently, the team sent to Tal Afar will be back soon without providing all of the refugees with their needs.

Now I want to ask him, is it worthy to build a five-star hotel for westerners and prevent people of this country from their RIGHT?!

Now you, Iraqi people, the government whom you voted for forgot about you and started taking care of their allies rather than you. You are left with a dirty city, no place to have fun in, no clubs, no open roads, no services, no electricity, no fuel, no water, no safety, and no CONTROL at all. This government is hiding behind the Jersey Walls surrounding the Green Zone where the 5-star hotel will be built. This government which says it "cares about you and about your safety" is building a new 5-star hotel. What a tragedy?! "Long live the Tyrant." As Twenty Four Steps to Liberty said.

Down the street

Vallejo Nocturno 2005 -Down the street

Veterans for peace

From Common Dreams article Iraq War Veterans Presence in D.C. Unreported:

The New York Times (Sept. 25, 2005) and much of the other news coverage of Saturday's anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. failed to note the presence of a particularly knowledgeable group of protestors - recently-returned veterans of the war in Iraq.

Gathered behind a wide banner reading "Iraq Veterans Against the War," approximately fifty men and women in desert camouflage uniforms or IAVW T-shirts spoke with a handful of reporters before moving out to take their place in the miles-long march though the city streets and past the White House. Short-haired, neat and polite, they answered questions with a seriousness and conviction born of their first-hand experiences with the war.           

Elizabeth Spradlin, an attractive Colorado Springs native with straight neck-length brown hair, spoke with quiet intensity of her year in Iraq. It began in March, 2003, when she was part of the invasion force moving from Kuwait to Baghdad.

"Going into that country, immediately they were welcoming, wanting us there. And over the course of three months we basically caused so much trouble in the area we were in. We didn't have interpreters. We were not helping them re-build their country. We were just driving around with our vehicles with guns, not communicating with them in any way, just basically occupying their space, their country. And they kept on coming to us asking us to help them re-build and -- based on my personal experience -- we weren't doing anything to help them."

Vallejo Nocturno 2005 - Vets for Peace

Sponsors of the War

The Media and its role in chosing to ignore the messages from this weekends march in Washington from an article at Common Dreams by Norman Solomon:

It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more perfunctory back-page articles were typical in daily papers across the country. And over the weekend, many TV news watchers saw little or nothing about the protests.

Hurricane Rita was clearly a factor. But even without dramatic natural disasters, the news media are ready, willing and able to downplay news about war -- and the antiwar movement -- for any number of reasons. Conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill or in newsrooms can tamp down media coverage of a surging movement. What's crucial is that the movement not allow its momentum to be interrupted by media treatment.

If "journalism is the first draft of history," the journalism of corporate media is usually the quickie top-down view of history that's told from vantage points far removed from progressive movements. Media technologies and styles aside, what we're experiencing now from major U.S. news outlets is not very different from the coverage of the Vietnam War.

More of the article

Relief Not War

Vallejo Nocturno 2005 - Relief Not War

Much More Dangerous

Vallejo Nocturno 2005 - Much More