Monday, May 30, 2011

Sleeping Soldiers


Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Tim HetheringtonSleeping Soldiers (2009).

Filmed in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan in 2007-8 following a platoon of US Airborne Infantry. Single screen version of the original 3-screen installation.


via: even cleveland

Sunday, May 29, 2011

the world's worst wound


 
On Passing the New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. 

Siegfried Sassoon
image: uncertain

Thursday, May 26, 2011

an oppression, like the heat

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs1mCTpklcWA6fKF9BJUCcdIxrhtJ0A7qO6pTgmZoxmICCwkqZzXxkhroMQD890zLLhCUd-Kotuphg12fgvMm3_LnhlYArUJTiJTpv7dOAqyWfwRYoklticR4kJJLXaJbdhwQqgcrqEt5M/s640/DSC_0001.JPG 
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.

 "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolf via Royal Quiet Deluxe
 image:le dans la

Sunday, May 8, 2011

She's always smiling

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lk3qb8BFb11qcq48go1_500.jpg
I do not doubt you would have liked
one of those pretty mothers in the ads:
complete with adoring husband and happy children.
She's always smiling, and if she cries at all
it is absent of lights and camera,
makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard --
(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me
when she heard).

I cannot tell you that I know the road.
Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,
go forward holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.

Daisy Zamora

Clean Slate, trans. by Margaret Randall and Elinor Randall



banupluie:

Friday, May 6, 2011

We are only the idea


… we are only fiction. We are only the idea we have of ourselves.
Edmond Jabès, from Cut of Time (via proustitute)

Alice Leach, The Space in Between