dowackado

ineffable beauty, unspeakable evil, etc

Before and after

By timmukyPosted on Posted in fashionNo Comments on Before and after

models before and after

Nothing new, but I’ve had that Ralph Lauren Photoshop debacle on my mind lately. This year-old slide show is from the New York magazine Web site, and features “before” shots of bare-faced models, and “after” shots of them made up for the Milan Gucci show. The transformations are pretty dramatic, but there are other striking things about this: mainly, that these girls look awfully gaunt in their au naturel state (though, it must be said, they are still, er, lookers). But they look particularly unwell to my eyes, like they’d been partying all night. And maybe they had.

I am something of an agnostic on the heated body image debate fashion models tend to ignite. Yes, many of them are WAY too thin,and present bad role models (though I’ve never really believed in that concept). But to me, the extreme body modification implicit in their business is not all that different from what’s expected of athletes, especially in dimension-focused sports like basketball and especially football. Not to mention that the opposite of obsessive thinness is a true epidemic of obesity that is ruining the health of, and killing, people in far greater numbers than anything eating disorders cause.

The commodification of people’s bodies is at the root of this, which is sort of self-evident and not really helpful. OK. At bottom I blame capitalism. There, I said it. Next subject.

The Chair Force

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Fascinating article on the operators of Predator and Reaper drones, who sit in naugahyde chairs in Nevada, monitor the war zone, sometimes launch Hellfire missiles that kill people (many people) in Iraq or Afghanisgtan–then clock out, and get home in time for soccer practice.

“Combat is a very personal event,” [Col. Pete] Gersten [commander of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing] said. Getting questions at home at the end of each shift means “that compartment is being breached to a degree.” Even for those willing to share that aspect of their lives with their spouse, they feel limited by the secret nature of their job.

“It’s more frustrating than anything else. Your family doesn’t have a security clearance, so it makes for really boring dinner conversation,” said Lt. Col. David Kent, an F-15E pilot who was recently stationed at Creech and now teaches at the Air Force Academy. “You feel really good about something you did that day, but you can’t say anything. Your family can’t share the triumphs and trials with you.”

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on drone warfare states that there are about 10 collateral damage kills for every successful “take out” of intended targets. But to be fair her article discusses both the above-board military drone program discussed in this article, as well as the secret one run by the CIA, out of an unspecified location, and perhaps with hired contractors.

The Predator “pilots” emerge here as yet one more overworked and stressed out arm of the far-reaching ambitions of the U.S. military:

In 2006, a military study found Predator crews are at least as fatigued, if not more so, than pilots deployed downrange. Changes were made to the shifts, but a follow-up survey last year still showed “emotional exhaustion and burnout.”

The studies found many crew members are chronically fatigued, with about 40 percent reporting “a moderate to high likelihood of falling asleep in the [ground control station] while operating a weaponized, remotely piloted aircraft.”

Mathewson said conditions have improved, but sleep deprivation hasn’t stopped being an issue. Gersten said the fatigue is being “realized in vehicle accidents” on the drive home from base.

“It’s insane,” Kent said. “You can’t run an Air Force like this without burning your people out.”

I didn’t expect to feel any sympathy for these guys, but I sort of do. Given my basic problem with anyone being willing to kill on command, whether it be Raymond strangling his buddy with a white scarf in The Manchurian Candidate, Civil War soldiers standing toe to toe and bayonetting one another, or pulling a trigger, or pushing a button on a joystick, the warriors of the “chair force” do have a pretty sucky job in the great scheme of things.

Tom Englehardt is all over this subject, and has been for years. Here is a collection of articles on Tomdispatch.com.

Kinky boots/the worst canvas imaginable

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I love this video, not for its critique of the over the knee boot trend in fashion capitals Paris and New York.  That I will leave to the crazy/brilliant/crazy Awl writer Mary HK Choi:

I can’t deal. It’s fall 2009 and what they’ve predicted has all come true. I’ve seen ’em. They’ve officially descended upon us like the vinyl-clad seat of a dominatrix who mistakenly thinks we want our faces suffocated. They’re everywhere. On the street. On public transportation. The sticky, deplorable, throbbing, bastard mass sprung from the loins of FASHION like so much Strangé perfume from Grace Jones’ womb: the over-the-knee-boot.

This is old news as far as EVERYBODY showing some version of this on their runways for fall but now we’re beginning to see them, not on the spindly femurs of stick people like Vogue Nippon’s Anna Dello Russo who’s so thin JAPANESE people want to give her a sandwich and then fly a plane sideways through the isosceles triangle of negative space between her thighs. I’m seeing this scourge on the worst canvas imaginable—regular folk. The Gucci, Louboutin, Choo, Chanel has trickled down to Charlotte Russe, Victoria’s Secret and Steve Madden and yo, this is BAD NEWS.

No, my interest is in the cackling, clearly extemporaneous voice over by legendary NY Times street cameraman Bill Cunningham. A New York Times personality who talks like a New Yorker. That is actually cool.

[Having a hard time getting an embedded video from the NYTimes site, so the link at the top of the post will have to do. At least I know it works.]

Let’s stop showering the world with Bomb Love

By timmukyPosted on Posted in militarism, politics, warTagged , , , No Comments on Let’s stop showering the world with Bomb Love

Jeff Huber is a retired Naval commander who provides a pretty refreshing insiderish perspective on our runaway military culture. This is a typical offering. He is also one of the few writers who have mentioned the one thing that makes our insane military state superfluous. Two things, actually: the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The oceans and our size provide us with ample security protection, just as they did in the day of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin. No one can invade and occupy us. Nobody would ever be crazy enough to pop a nuclear missile off in our direction, or in the direction of any of our friends (do we have any of those left?)

No one is interested in competing with us militarily, not even Russia or China. Let’s start coming home and fixing our own problems, and take the world off our shoulders. It will get along fine without us bombing it on a regular basis.

He also is nicely succinct in dismissing the Iran hysteria that afflicts both parties

Iran serves a vital role in the Pentagon’s long war strategy. It’s a neo-East Germany; a pseudo-client state of Russia, plopped in the middle of the Middle East. It gives us a reason to keep troops located in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers came from Iraq or even Afghanistan and certainly not from Iran.

Iran is an excuse to keep the war machine rolling.

Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent of ours. It can’t project conventional land power much beyond its borders. Its navy is a coast guard and its air force is a junkyard. It doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. Yet we’re up in arms about it. How senseless.

And he saves some choice words for a former ViceCo-President:

Speaking of senseless, Dick Cheney is on the rampage again. He is the most dishonest, most misguided villain of the 21st century, but when he speaks, he gets more bandwidth than the World Series, the Super Bowl and Internet porn combined. He’s not even attractive to look at or listen to, and he has a proven track record of not knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a militaristic dipswitch.

Huber is often on antiwar.com, and has a blog at Pen and Sword. He is also one of the few writers to follow the grotesque acts of insubordination and/or treason by top military brass. See General Treachery.

Early Shakira, when she was even more awesome

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Just watched the Shewolf video from the new, bodacious, blond Shakira. Two comments: 1. I could use a shower, and 2. it’s fascinating how much she’s changed. For the better or not, who knows? But I prefer this video and this song, from her days as a strange little would-be hippie girl with too much dark eyeliner. So much going on here, so many musical styles. And I love when she becomes a robotic wig mannequin.

“They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in politics, Uncategorized, warTagged , , No Comments on “They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that”

“Problems with killer drones” is the tepid headline of a summary article at AtlanticWire, collecting responses to Jane Mayer’s typically thorough investigation into Obama’s “weapon of choice”–deadly rocket attacks launched by Predator drones. (The link is to an abstract. Unfortunately, the entire article is behind the New Yorker’s firewall.)

The liberal response, represented by Lisa Schrich at HuffingtonPost, points out that ten civilians die for every militant killed in a drone strike and that they “undermine both Pakistani and Afghan state sovereignty and legitimacy, stir political unrest, and challenge alliances.”

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but she might go even further: it’s murder without any sort of due process. When did America decide it could kill anyone on the planet, without a peep of opposition from its media outlets or political class?

Actually, you can put a date on it. September 11, 2001. Before that, as Mayer relates, our government criticized Israel’s targeted killings of Palestinian militants. Martin Indyk, then ambassador to Israel, actually said, in June of that year, “the United States government is very clearly on record against targeted assassinations…. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”

But September 11 Changed All That. And blowing suspected militants, and anyone in the neighborhood, to smithereens from two miles up in the sky became an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Think about that. Never mind that there are many more misses than hits, or that a “kill” with ten additional corpses is cause for high fives all around, or that the most celebrated kill of recent times, of Baitalluh Meshud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, only came after fifteen failed strikes, killing up to 321 additional people. “We”–our government–have no right to do anything like that. Right? Right? Even if we “take out” the target with the precision that so often claimed but never demonstrated, there’s no due process, no evidence whatsoever that the target is guilty of the crimes, or dark thoughts (the same thing in recent times) we accuse him of. In a terrific essay last month, Tom Englehardt made the case that to the rest of the world, we have become the Martians of HG Wells’ fiction, who, with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” destroy human bodies and lives and communities without a second thought.

We go about our comfortable lives and rarely have cause to think about the women, children, and noncombatants who live in daily fear of being vaporized, torn apart, crushed or poisoned by the high-tech weaponry of a nation half a world away. This suits the politicians and the generals just fine, for whom it is almost literally a video game. Few American lives are at risk, the victims are invisible, both parties can appear to be taking a stand against terror, and the money to the military machine keeps flowing.

I think the last word should go to Harry Lime of The Third Man, who defends his death-dealing black marketeering (an operation that seems almost quaint today) while high in a Ferris Wheel overlooking Vienna with the words: “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”

“Path of war is a surefire loser”

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Turse and Englehardt offer one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the strange Nobel decision, and a good summary of the limits of military power:

Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It’s an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It’s also the president’s chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his — and all Americans’ — hands.

More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?

The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.

Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.

A “slow-motion apocalypse in progress”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, ocean, UncategorizedTagged , , No Comments on A “slow-motion apocalypse in progress”

Photographer Chris Jordan has photographed the stomach contents of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll, “one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.”

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way.

In his artist’s statement for another exhibit, Jordan writes that his work shows evidence of “a slow-motion apocalypse in progress.”

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

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