A Reminder

More from Glassell Park, Los Angeles. x

Mon, 28 May 2012 18:47:00 +0200

Glassell Park, Los Angeles. Brief away-from-the-Bay getaway.

Mon, 28 May 2012 18:20:28 +0200

Glassell Park, Los Angeles.

Brief away-from-the-Bay getaway.

I took this last Thursday at the Golden Gate Art Gallery at...

Sun, 27 May 2012 21:15:00 +0200

I took this last Thursday at the Golden Gate Art Gallery at Cavallo Point.

A beautiful quote of a beautiful bridge of a beautiful metaphor of people.

Happy Anniversary, Red.

Took a little while to build you, but it was worth it. :)

Photo

Fri, 25 May 2012 23:57:36 +0200

jmxwll: “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting...

Fri, 25 May 2012 23:57:11 +0200

jmxwll:

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” - Hemingway

Photo

Fri, 25 May 2012 19:17:58 +0200

:) valdean: The story behind this photo.

Thu, 24 May 2012 01:02:09 +0200

valdean:

The story behind this photo.

I used to be able to see the Chrysler Building perfectly from my...

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:23:25 +0200

I used to be able to see the Chrysler Building perfectly from my rooftop in NYC.

Beautiful.

A great park. I miss living in NYC. jolukavorka: Gramercy Park...

Mon, 21 May 2012 07:12:00 +0200

A great park.

I miss living in NYC.

jolukavorka:

Gramercy Park -Up close from outside.

westberlin: Herr and Frau Fritz Kehl having dinner on the...

Sat, 19 May 2012 18:48:14 +0200

westberlin:

Herr and Frau Fritz Kehl having dinner on the terrace of their bombed out villa. West Berlin, March 1950

Photo: Nina Leen

(via LIFE)

pizzaispurple: “UNTIL YOU’RE FULLY GROWN YOU’VE GOT A REAL GOOD SHOT WON’T HELP TO HOLD INSIDE KEEP...

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:53:12 +0200

pizzaispurple:

“UNTIL YOU’RE FULLY GROWN
YOU’VE GOT A REAL GOOD SHOT
WON’T HELP TO HOLD INSIDE
KEEP IT REAL KEEP IT REAL
SHOUT OUT”

Brother Sport, Animal Collective

Old photos of Berlin never get old. Brandenburg Gate, Berlin -...

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:03:35 +0200

Old photos of Berlin never get old.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin - 1946

Photo by Werner Bischof

:( pbstv: “That manic kid in that silly wolf suit has made my...

Tue, 08 May 2012 20:28:15 +0200

pbstv:

“That manic kid in that silly wolf suit has made my life pleasurable.”

In 2002, the PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown talked to Maurice Sendak about his roots as an artist and his interest in exploring children’s perceptions of everyday life.

Read the interview and read Maurice Sendak’s full biography.

A Sarajevo story. An aftermath.

Sun, 06 May 2012 01:07:00 +0200

Last July, around the middle of the month, I made an abrupt decision to book a flight and head to Sarajevo.

In between what was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and what ended up becoming a disastrous Saturday evening, my afternoon fingers navigated me towards the necessary websites to book all travel and accommodation. I knew I needed a vacation but I didn’t recognize how bad until I left a week later - like a premonition. I was still living in Berlin then. The summer started to become chilly. And it didn’t warm up for the rest of the season.

I’ve traveled alone a lot. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. And with age, I’ve now realized I’d like to have a travel companion. But this was a trip I’m glad I took alone.

I’ve traveled for a variety of reasons - to work, to learn, often just for fun, and sometimes for a bit of perspective to assist myself through challenging times, etc. This trip was a combination of those last three, woven together by my historical and deep curiosity.

Somewhere, some time in my past, I found in me an acute interest in conflict and resolution. I find this surfaces most often in the context of revolution, genocide or just generally relating to the political economy of war. Quite frankly, it starts first as a morbid fascination and then subsequently transforms into a hopeful belief in progress and change; a positive path beyond what is our very normal yet unfortunate capacity to do shitty, shitty things to one another. These are the things that read like fiction and yet happen every day. It’s an obsession with things so wrong because of another very real obsession with the ability for things to be so right.

I chose to go to Sarajevo, Bosnia to get my fill this time.

A city once proud hosts of the 1984 Winter Olympics, it was left to sniper attacks and shell bombings less than eight years later after the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of former Yugoslavia.

As the chief architect of the “second Yugoslavia,” Tito, for better or for worse, built a system that kept some diverse, complicated shit together. It might not be your version of order. But it was tolerated by and functional to others. Arguably, it worked. And in the West, we later watched it fall as we applauded and welcomed the New World Order. What we saw next was the subsequent corporatization of those far-reaching places of the earth needing and begging to be saved. (Sarcasm.) And in parallel, we pretty much stood by as the aftermath of genocide, scramble for land, international war, civil defense, and “UN Peacekeeping” took over a territory we really had no idea about in the first place.

I still visualize my local and national leaders quickly fumbling through history books trying to grasp the complexity of an explosive situation until finally saying, “Fuck it. Let them kill each other until enough of them are dead, their fingers too tired to pull any more triggers, and when credit cards finally parade in on the roads paved by international aid for consumers.”

I was 12 when the Siege of Sarajevo began, so the aforementioned visualization is relatively recent. And illustrated more by this last trip. I mean, do you remember what went down there? Are you at least in your late 20s and remember it mentioned, albeit most likely very briefly, on your local news channel? Or in your daily paper? For me, it was sandwiched between the post-Apartheid prison release of Nelson Mandela and the Rwandan Genocide. I thought the world was going crazy. Now I know it always is.

(Fuck it. Let’s just dance it off. How depressing.

I laugh a lot - a ton, actually. I promise.)

Defined as “the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare,” all I remember seeing on TV in Minnesota were CNN clips of sniper attacks in the city mashed up with scenes of shell bombings and camps full of skinny, frail people. These were “prisoners” I didn’t know were being organized for other reasons.

“Ethnic cleansing” was one of the euphemisms I remember hearing. But so was the historical and often-repeated phrase ‘never again’. So, what the fuck was going on?

At some point during one of these evening news nights, my Mom said to me, “Good people sometimes do bad things. But the afraid, they do the most disappointing and sometimes, frightening things. They are the ones who need our positivity the most. They need the knowledge of those they can believe in and the courage to decide the right time to compromise and move forward together or walk away.”

No one walked away for four years in Sarajevo.

These things were happening when I was barely a teenager! I just wanted to play basketball, practice hurdling, and listen to Janet Jackson and early Radiohead.

I did do these things. I was a happy, creative, laughing child. I barely remember large chunks of time when I wasn’t outside or amongst friends. But sometimes when I wasn’t, I would think about these things.

Like so many transformational events during my formative years, my parents asked me to pay attention. So I did. Their requests later became one of the reasons why I’ve never been able to shrug off this obsession.

Back to 2011.

I only had five days in Sarajevo. Well, four, really. Half of two days, on either end, were spent wandering around Vienna for nine hours in between connecting flights (in my flip-flops, of course).

Once I arrived, my host, a native of the city, picked me up at the airport and gave me a tour of Sarajevo under the stars. My curiosity was immediately apparent and in response to my onslaught of questions, he grinned, stopped at the red light, stared at me and asked,

“Hey, why did you come to Sarajevo? Why does a single, American female get on a plane and come to Sarajevo by herself for a few days? This isn’t the most glamorous place.”

I explained myself a bit - the context above, and a vague summary of current circumstances, all of which contributed to why I was there.

After that, he said he found in me “an obsession with struggle and justice” and “fearlessness” and “honesty.” He appeared to trust me because an hour later I found myself in the know about his personal history, the history of his city, and the history of a war he witnessed and fought in firsthand, side-by-side with his own father.

A two-year veteran of the war, from age 17, he fought as part of the Bosnian civil army, defending the city during the last two years of the Siege. Immediately after the war, he was hired by the UN to do various technical work in other war zones across the globe. Now back home in Sarajevo, he is working for another branch of the UN. He now lives a much calmer life, taking care of his ailing mother and telling an overly curious American woman his life story.

Hearing just the beginning of what was this man’s personal history was already begging me to ask more questions. Needless to say, I asked more questions.

The next day, my first full day, I walked around Sarajevo solo. It’s not a huge city. I ventured on a rickety Soviet-style tram to the city center and once I had my touristy fill, I took to the valley of low hills that surround it.

These aren’t just empty hills. From the base of the city, you can see the immense white patches. They look like ghosts in the form of thick pencils. These are the war graveyards.

They are very pretty, actually. They are surrounded by houses that look as if they are falling on top of one other.

I must have spent five hours up there that evening, just around dusk - my favorite time of day.

I hiked around and studied the dates on the graves. At first I only saw: 1996. 1997. 1996. 1996. 1997. 1995. 1997. 1996. 1996. 1996. These were the years I knew most victims fell.

Then: 2000. 2001. 2000. 2000. 2001. 2000. 2000. 2001.

The next day, my host ended up taking a day off work to show me around more of Sarajevo’s war landmarks. Some were tourist destinations, others were spots only he knew. The balance between the tourist-guide version and his personal narrative was sobering and perfect. His knowledge was deep, sometimes frightening but always believable.

Hours later, while walking around one of the giant state parks on the outskirts of the city, I asked him about the jump.

“Those graves I saw before. 1996, 1997, and then a jump. Why the jump?”

“I will try to put it simple. You get the bullets first. Then other post-war mysteries sneak up on you: different tragic casualties, like cancer. And no one ever really died of cancer like that before. Well, no, some did, of course. But never so many at once. Very strange, no? Later a man once came to do some tests, around 2003–2004, because of that very mystery. But he soon disappeared. Rumors were that he was killed. But we all knew the truth, however. We knew that in wars, bullets only kill so many…”

His own father lost his leg in the war. Then he died of cancer four years later. He was perfectly healthy four years before.

He continued to tell me more about the last 50+ years of Yugoslav/post-Yugoslav life and how it relates to this new transformative era we now find ourselves in. Corporations moving in. Resources moving out. The war in Sarajevo that helped to merge those paths there.

He explained the strategy of the snipers during the Siege. These were often the mercenaries who were on the sides of no one and in it for the thrill - the opportunists of war.

Opportunists are the worst.

He drove me to some of the best views and explained the geography of what is a comfortably sized city but not big by any means - sandwiched in a valley, surrounded by towering hills.

“It’s perfect for snipers. Perfect for a strategy to sneakily shell bomb buildings during the workday, prompt people out of the buildings and into the streets so as to provide prey for those hiding in the hills. They were always hiding in the hills.”

“Right and there are thousands of houses in the hills. Were they completely empty during the war?”

“No, everyone lived in their houses. They lived in their apartments. They went out at night. Girls put on make-up, met their boys. We lived. The young ones created makeshift clubs. Bars with candles. Dance parties to pretend the war didn’t exist. We all just watched out for crossfire. We might not have had electricity for four years but we lived. We went to school. We had to. We just made sure that we put dark blankets over our windows at home so our profiles couldn’t be identified at night by our candlelight. We had to live. We just had to trick the snipers.” These scenes were all very normal to him as he described them.

We wrapped up what was one of our final, long conversations. My short trip was nearly done. Two days later, he took me to the airport at dawn. This was the same airport once held by the Yugoslav army, surrendered to the UN, beaten up by crossfire, and acting as virtually the only “neutral” territory for miles during much of the war.

He walked me inside. He shook hands with everyone. He was humble, quiet and very polite.

At the gate his goodbye went something like this,

“So, there you go, Emily. Thank you for listening. I wonder if you think you’ve heard enough? You surely have enough to write my biography. Please tell your parents I say hello. And for whatever reason you came here, I am sure you’ll go back home with more lessons on resilience and compromise, all of which will continue to help you keep that big smile on your face you seem to so often wear.”

Great quote. :( ario: “I’ll actually quote the Dalai Lama on that one, because I heard him...

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:25:12 +0200

Great quote.

ario:

“I’ll actually quote the Dalai Lama on that one, because I heard him talking about that. People had asked him whether they thought technology was a good thing or a bad thing, the sort of level of it. He basically just said, “It’s just a tool.” Tools can be used in constructive ways or destructive ways. It really comes back to motivation, to human motivation of how this stuff is used.”

— Happiness According to Adam Yauch

Stunning. pennyonthetrack: forest house by peter bohlinI’ve...

Sat, 05 May 2012 18:04:39 +0200

Stunning.

pennyonthetrack:

forest house by peter bohlin

I’ve always really, really liked this project.

;) Berghain. Shine those post-communist club lights bright.

Thu, 03 May 2012 03:18:50 +0200

;)

Berghain.

Shine those post-communist club lights bright.

Insanity. Somehow reminds me of my...

Tue, 01 May 2012 05:18:53 +0200

Insanity.

Somehow reminds me of my old Transformers.

architectura:

The Slauerhoffbrug is a fully automatic bascule bridge in the city of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. It uses two arms to swing a section of road in and out of place within the road itself. It is also known as the “Slauerhoffbrug ‘Flying’ Drawbridge”.

Three of my favorites. L.E.T L.A....

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:02:00 +0200

http://twitter.com/#!/NoGodsNoMasters/st

http://twitter.com/#!/GregBresnitz/statu

http://twitter.com/#!/Sinkane/status/193

Three of my favorites.

L.E.T

L.A. Heyyyyyy.

everything-ecstatic:

Thom Yorke at Brainfeeder party

The National, Green Gloves littleillusions: Falling out of...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:37:00 +0200

The National, Green Gloves

littleillusions:

Falling out of touch with all my friends -

are somewhere getting wasted.

Hope they’re staying glued together.

High hopes for them.