Joel Meyerowitz

There hasn't been much in the news about what is happening at ground zero. The news media seems to have a pretty short attention span. But someone is doing something.

Afterimages

''We go to Pompeii two thousand years later and see the people who were caught in the lava,'' photographer Joel Meyerowitz was saying. ''The remains of their breakfasts, the terrazzo floors in their homes. We think about how remarkable their lives were. Well, this is our Pompeii.''

It was four weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the lava, so to speak, was still smoldering. In the fading afternoon sunlight, on the southern perimeter of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, Meyerowitz unshouldered his bulky view camera and lowered its tripod legs
(...)

Meyerowitz, a tall, sparely built man with a great dome of a bald head, peered through the viewfinder of his 1942 Deardorff. The camera, his professional calling card, takes large (up to 8 by 10 inches), highly detailed negatives. Meyerowitz was supposed to have it with him in Tuscany this fall, snapping photos for a book that would take its place beside ''Cape Light,'' his well-known collection of Cape Cod landscapes.
[read more]

Joel Meyerowitz is, probably, my favorite photographer (so many to choose from!). He was black and white street photographer in New York for many years until he discovered color and the 8X10 view camera which takes negatives that produce the most beautiful and detailed prints. There is no grain. He broke onto the color photography scene with his exquisite book "Cape Light".

For years he had a studio in New York from which he took pictures which included the World Trade Center.

Now he is documenting ground zero with is view camera.

Terry Gross, of Fresh Air, interviewed Joel Meyerowitz. Listening to Joel describe what he has seen and is doing is amazing. Listen to it.

Joel's web site

Al-Jazeera

Al-Jazeera is the Arab cable news network that the US tried to muzzle. Cursor has a page of links to articles about Al-Jazeera.

In defense of al-Jazeera
By Michael Moran

The first time most Americans heard the name al-Jazeera was Sunday, Oct. 7, the day U.S. and British forces began hitting the Taliban and its “guests” in Afghanistan. The timing was almost surely accidental — Western journalists had spent three weeks expecting an attack at any moment. But the impact on the White House was undeniable, and suddenly Washington reverted to the kind of bullying that had not been evident in the buildup to the attack.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced al-Jazeera for airing “vitriolic, irresponsible kinds of statements” when it broadcast a videotaped statement by suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden praising the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The CIA leaked its concern that bin Laden might be sending secret messages through these taped statements. Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, called and visited with top American network and newspaper representatives, urging them to consider the dangers of airing bin Laden’s views. On the shallower media outlets around the U.S., al-Jazeera suddenly found itself being equated with the former Communist mouthpiece Pravda or Hitler’s National Zeitung.
(...)

The truth could hardly be more different.
[read more]

We are supposed to be fighting for freedom? Doesn't that include freedom of the press? Not according to some Americans who feel we should jam Al-Jazeera or, better yet, let the military shut it down. We can't have some Arab countering our government's propoganda with the actual news.

Until Al-Jazeera starts some English programming you can get a machine translation of their website. The syntax is akward but it is easier than reading anything Shrub has to say. Just click on the Al-Jazeera link under "Most visited sites" and click on translate.

Pictures from Al-Jazeera

Michael Moran's article (above) ends:

That brings us to the final lesson here: what passes for news in America. For the past 10 years, roughly since the idiotic O.J. Simpson trial, the language of marketing has entered American newsrooms like a badly targeted cruise missile. Talk of plot lines and demographics, sexiness and “water-cooler” appeal have polluted a mission that is protected by its own constitutional amendment. Celebrity journalists interview celebrity dimwits about their sex lives, while American foreign policy is left running on auto-pilot.

The hard truth is that the U.S. media left America as unprepared for these terrorist attacks as any Air Force general or CIA bureaucrat. As we dropped bombs on Iraq for 10 years running — justified or not — the U.S. media failed to report on it. Then suddenly, on Sept. 11, we think “We’re at war” when in fact there hasn’t been a day since the Gulf War ended when an American aircraft hasn’t locked onto a target with a missile or bomb. We were at war, it’s just that the media didn’t think it was interesting enough to tell you about it.

That’s our lesson to learn.

Moby Dick.

Melville Has Never Looked Better

One hundred fifty years ago this month Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' was first published, to mixed reviews and, as they say in the trade, disappointing sales. In our own moment of horror and heroism, it is a book more salient than ever -- unflinchingly honest about the human capacity for hate and brutality, yet filled with an undiscourageable love of humanity. In its own day, it was received by many critics as a half-mad rant.
(...)

For modern readers, ''Moby-Dick'' forecast the future in which they found themselves living. Melville took as his subject the first international industry dominated by the United States, and thereby bore witness to the ''manifest destiny'' of a nation just beginning during his lifetime to grow from a continental into a world power. In recounting the love between an American boy (Ishmael) and a tattooed cannibal (Queequeg), he intimated, long before it was common to think so, that human sexuality ranges freely along a continuum of desire and cannot be contained within established norms. In his grisly account of the business of killing whales, he anticipated today's environmentalist indignation at people who have a purely instrumental relation to nature; but he also treated all pieties and pietists with proto-postmodern irony -- as when he asks, ''With what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars?'' And with eerie prescience, he foresaw in ''Moby-Dick'' the most gruesome phenomenon of modern times -- of which we have been so terribly reminded by recent events -- how a demagogue can fuse his personal need for vengeance with the popular will by promising his followers a huntable enemy in which evil was ''made practically assailable.''
[read more]

I'm afraid that I have never read "Moby-Dick". I saw the Gregory Peck movie when it came out in 1956. That probably doesn't count. I have a book that belonged to my Dad - The Romances of Herman Melville. Published in 1931. It has "Moby-Dick". It's time to read it.

Call me Ishmael...

But wait, there's more! We bring you back to our regularly scheduled war.

These comics have been linked to a lot but there are more being added and they are not to be missed.