#like opposite of your dynamic traveling is a static location

[teecupangel]

The ink-stained parchment lay before me, bearing words of importance. It held a message that needed to reach distant shores, far beyond the reach of my current abode. The task was clear—I had to undertake a voyage, braving unknown lands and treacherous seas, to ensure the safe delivery of this precious missive.

With the letter safely tucked away in my bag, I embarked on a grand adventure. The road unfurled before me, winding through verdant landscapes and bustling towns. Each step carried me closer to my destination, yet the distance seemed vast, the expanse of the world unfathomable.

As I traveled, I marveled at the sights and sounds of foreign lands. The air was scented with unfamiliar fragrances, the language spoken by the locals a melodious symphony that danced upon my ears. The customs and traditions of these distant realms intrigued me, offering glimpses into lives so different from my own.

Days turned into nights, and nights into days, as my journey pressed on. I encountered fellow travelers along the way, their stories intertwining with mine for fleeting moments. We shared meals, exchanged laughter, and bid each other farewell, knowing that our paths diverged as swiftly as they had converged.

The physical distance between me and the intended recipient of the letter seemed inconsequential compared to the emotional chasm bridged by those written words. They held the power to convey sentiments that transcended borders and time, reaching into the depths of the reader's heart.

Through rugged terrain and unpredictable weather, my resolve remained unyielding. The letter, a testament to love, friendship, or perhaps a plea for forgiveness, grew heavier with each passing mile. Its contents were etched in my memory, their weight echoing in my thoughts.

Finally, after countless trials and tribulations, I arrived at the edge of the known world—the place where the letter would find its final purpose. The distant land, with its foreign customs and unknown faces, embraced me in its arms. The letter, once entrusted to me, was now ready to continue its journey, to convey its message to the one who shall receive it.

With a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, I stood before the local post office—a humble abode where dreams and stories converged. I handed over the letter, its journey nearly complete. The postmaster, with a kind smile, assured me of its safe passage, knowing the significance it held for both sender and recipient.

As I departed from that distant land, a sense of fulfillment washed over me. Though the journey had been arduous, it had been imbued with purpose and meaning. The letter, a vessel of emotions and words, had been delivered to its intended destination, bridging the distance between hearts separated by miles and oceans.

The receiver by the name of Teecupangel opened the mail and pulled out the letter, inside it says "HayDes where they are both birds"

(I have no regrets)

After a brief confusing mistaken identity incident compounded by the sudden traveling and moving weak bones unused to such travels nowadays had to endure, the alchemist known by many names has finally gotten used to the new atelier. A large cauldron with liquid swirling in colors of golden sands and azure time ready to be filled with many alchemic materials sits over a fire on the right end of the main room. Next to it is a small chalkboard that has been written on and erased so many times it has forever been whitened by the residue of the previous words clinging to it now written with a new list of the materials that must be added to the cauldron before the end of the week so that the alchemist might be able to peddle next week’s wares to the archives.

On the table near the cauldron lies two synthesized items of a kind of glass bomb, its clear glass surface showing the swirling golden flames made of high-quality gunpowder, inspired by a recipe from a group of professional alchemists only known as IW. One of the bombs seemed to have been placed in an apparatus of some kind, an alchemic tool used to rebuild already created synthesized items so they may be checked and materials may be added or changed if necessary.

A final step needed to ensure the quality of each synthesized item before they are peddled to the archives.

By the back of the main room, next to the large chest filled with materials picked or ordered by the alchemist were seven or eight cauldrons of varying sizes all stacked on top of each other, each bearing a little post-it with different numbers that seemed to be ‘0808’, ‘0812’, ‘0816’, ‘0826’ or ‘0828’. One of these cauldrons seemed to have the phrase ‘?w b 1012’.

On the left wall of the main room of this atelier, there appeared to be smaller cauldrons all lined up with a smaller fire already crackling over a small cauldron. There was the shining sounds that alerted the alchemist that it was done and the liquid inside the cauldron turned into a puff of multicolored smoke. All that was left inside was some kind stuffed teddy bear that seemed to have come from the nightmares of children. The alchemist grabbed the cauldron and hauled it off next to a box filled with small items that had been requested before and will be delivered today. The alchemist took the teddy bear and inspected it to make sure it was of good quality before placing it on the box. The alchemist walked back to the line of smaller cauldrons and took the closest to the fire before grabbing the next one and dragging it closer. The alchemist took the letter that they have placed inside when they had prepared the cauldron and placed the cauldron into the fire. As the cauldron heats, liquid of endless possibility slowly fill the cauldron while the alchemist opens the letter. The alchemist’s lips curved into a smile as they read the journey that this letter had gone thru all in the hopes that the writer’s request would be given even just a small item.

Then…

“HayDes where they are both birds.”

And the alchemist shuffled to the chest of materials to look for bird feathers and taco shells…

(And you shouldn’t regret anything about this ask. The whole introductory part made me smile and really made me wonder what you plan to ask XD)

You’re free to think of what kind of bird they would be although I was thinking of a House Finch when I was writing this, the ones with the red plumage since red is both a part of Haytham’s color and the color of the Assassins that Desmond has in his main outfit.

Haytham used to be owned by one Reginald Birch who had to let him go because he was acquired illegally and, well, Reginald Birch was in trouble with the government for other more serious crimes that he can’t afford a ‘loose end’.

Haytham was just minding his own business, trying to get used to the sudden freedom he had received, flying out of the way of larger birds of prey that he would sometimes see flying above him when he happen to hear singing. He flies to that direction, making sure to stay in the cover of branches and anything that would hide him from any predators above him and managed to perch on a branch that overlooks a small home with a well-maintained lawn with a bird feeder at the center, surrounded by bushes that held delicious looking berries.

The singing was coming from the bird feeder where a lone bird of the same species as him seem to simply be lazing around, hopping from the bottom part of the feeder to the top, sometimes even dipping a wing into the drinking water for a bit.

Almost as if mesmerized by the song, Haytham raised his wings to take flight and go to the bird feeder but then he heard a loud cry of a bird of prey that sounded quite larger than him.

He raised his head…

And three large eagles stare down at him as if warning him to not do anything foolish.

Unorganized Notes

Desmond is unofficially the pet bird of the house with the bird feeder. Every morning, a man with glasses and a noticeable British accent would do maintenance of the lawn and even pick up some berries to place on the bird feeder for Desmond to snack on. Whenever Desmond chirps his gratitude to him, he just goes, “Yes, yes, of course you’re happy, you bloody freeloader.”

The three eagles are the ones keeping the other birds from going to the bird feeder. Haytham has no idea what they’re deal is and they have no plans to explain anything to Haytham but Desmond seemed to know them, even calling them by their names. They’re all different kinds of eagles.

Haytham gets a crow friend named Shay who tells him the tea. Apparently, Desmond was also thrown away like Haytham although Shay don’t know the reason for that one. Anyway, Desmond befriended the eagles during his time looking for a place to live and they just… sorta stayed together? Anyway, the owner of the bird feeder only knows about Desmond and the three eagles usually hunt nearby and stuff.

Haytham thinks the entire thing is stupid and, really, don’t the damn eagles think that maybe Desmond would like some company?

“Of course, just not you.”

This does end with Haytham getting Shay to make noises that wil distract the eagles (Shay decided that getting chased by that asshole dog Gaultier would be a good distraction enough and started screaming for help once he was nearby all the while goading Gaultier just to be a jerk).

Haytham manages to dive into the bird feeder but one of the eagles realized it and let out a loud cry to alert the others so Haytham ignored precision and grace for speed.

And ended up diving straight to the water fountain.

From there, the eagles are powerless as Desmond and Haytham start to grow closer because, now that Desmond has seen and talked to Haytham, they can’t ‘make him go away’ (“You’re going to eat him?!” “Shoo him away.” “But eating was never off the table.”) because that would make Desmond sad.

They usually just talk while sharing the bird feeder as they learned about each other and Haytham totally ignored the glaring he could see behind Desmond.

Once they started getting close, they began to groom each other.

Haytham usually hides in the bushes and flies from one bush to another whenever the owner would come out. Desmond tells him that this ‘Shaun’ would be happy to find another bird using this large bird feeder but Haytham isn’t gonna risk it since the man always sounds so annoyed when he’s doing the daily lawn maintenance.

When they’re finally together, they began to sing at the top of the bird feeder and Haytham stays even after the man has come out. The man stares at Haytham for a few seconds before turning to look at the forest where the eagles have (disgruntedly) approved of Haytham and Desmond’s relationship, “You three finally decided that Desmond can have a partner?” There was three sets of grumbling bird sounds and the man nods as he said, “Yeah, I guess not.” (From inside the house, they hear a female voice shout, “Shaun! Stop pretending you can understand birds!”)

Sidebar: I was thinking of this kind of feeder:

[curator-on-ao3]

With all due respect to the Pike x Batel fans out there, I think she's the most boring Pike recurring love interest. We get to know Una because she's a main character character and while I don't ship Pike x Vina, I do think she at least has an interesting backstory. But Marie? All we know about her is that she's a captain and Pike's girlfriend whereas Una, Vina, Spock, etc. are bit more fleshed out and therefore more fun for Pike to ship with.

I hear what you’re saying, anon, but I want to remind you of something you already know: different people ship differently.

The few Pike x Batel shippers I’ve seen (and I’m applying the “shipping” concept generously) have fallen into three main, sometimes overlapping categories:

people who will ship pretty much any canon ship

people who identify with Pike and/or with Batel

people who ship them based on the shipper’s headcanons (of Batel and/or reasons why Pike treats her so poorly).

Particularly in terms of headcanons, I can see why someone would want to ship Pike with a character the shipper can somewhat invent. For example, we know Batel wanted that promotion. We don’t know why. Is she ambitious? Tired of space travel and wanting a post at a more static location? Connected to a place and/or people near where the commodore posting would be and wanting to spend time there or with them? The opposite of ambitious and perceives flag officer work as less demanding than captaincy? Frustrated with flag officers and wanting to fix them? Admiring of flag officers and wanting to emulate them? Wanting access to different kinds of cases as an attorney? Does she have a mentor influencing her choices? A Starfleet family legacy? A first officer she can’t stand and wants to get away from or a first officer ready for captaincy whom she wants to help by opening up a captain’s seat? How would Pike figure or not figure into … any of this?

To some shippers, exploring potential character dynamics with a huge range of options is attractive.

These choices also can help shippers who want the canon to make sense. And if that means, for example, giving Batel emotional trauma from the Klingon War that causes her to stay with a partner she knows is lying to her, then that’s the shipper’s choice. It’s not canon (just about any headcanon I’ve seen has been better than the canon for this pairing), but it is shipping.

So, as of this break between seasons two and three, while I’m not interested in exploring this ship (and actually have disgust toward it for many, many, many deeply personal reasons that don’t have to do with Star Trek), we all come at fandom with our own wants and needs and desires. I respect that this pairing doesn’t work for you or for me, but people should ship what they like and hopefully have fun doing so.

Hugs to you if they’re welcome, anon, and I’m glad you’re enjoying digging into established characterization for your style of shipping. ❤️

[culturecomp]

Wild Speculation and Miitomo’s Prep For Animal Crossing Mobile

Talk online seems mostly in favor of Animal Crossing on mobile platforms but largely discludes that Miitomo prepared everyone for making a home and befriending animals and other players alike. Miitomo launched in early 2016 and allowed the Tomodachi experience developed and published for its own platforms to spread Nintendo’s presence on iOS and Android devices.

I spent several weeks on Miitomo and had friends from my contacts list, Facebook, and anywhere else I could find them. Friends were currency, but if you’ve launched the app and found someone in your house, my bet is that Animal Crossing Mobile will feel much the same way.

Miitomo had a 3D engine, something I hope Animal Crossing on iOS and Android doesn’t (see below), customizable interiors and allowed you to dress yourself. Friends and visitors and those you would visit all dressed themselves which Animal Crossing bucks by letting you set trends all the way to how people speak or literally how slang and style spreads. Animal Crossing: New Leaf did this really well and provides a basis for much of what I hope for here (unlike Miitomo).

Anyway, here’s the Wishlist:

Every neighbor the series has ever featured: I never played Animal Crossing: City Folk and before the cries of “what a fan” rain down on me I insist that everyone ignore console-based AC they can afford to. Affording time for neighbors probably won’t be a problem in Animal Crossing Mobile with a random draw as is customary, but having missed a few personalities here or there will guarantee you meet new ones time and time again.

A static 2D graphics system: Flipping between pages for the shops, post office (mailing friends with AC stationary on mobile!), clothes and your home will make navigating an animated list of neighbors that much more dynamic. Static menu systems should also negate some of the tool-swapping that has bogged down inventory management. I would rather dig so many days in a row for shovel upgrades than sell a shovel while trying to sell fruit I tapped on, ya dig?

One-touch farming, with a mini-game catch: If I have multiple fruits growing in my town, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to tap more than one tree. Swiping a circle to reel in a fish or swiping down to catch a bug seems like a no-brainer.

Instant-bank: Once I harvest fruit, catch fish or bugs, snatch a sea shell, or find/receive an item either buried or as a gift, I’d like it if iOS, Android Animal Crossing let me sell by button. While fossils and bugs and fish should go to the museum with a swipe or a separate location page, it should be static travel and all of that dialog from Blathers and his relatives should be skipped with a clicky interface.

Jumpy, quick-to-react gameplay: Anyone who tries Animal Crossing and abandons it loathes the gameplay without knowing how to label it anything other than lazy. Mobile platforms like iOS and Android should be the only place Animal Crossing experiments with the opposite to glazed movement and text in favor of clicky-quick reactive menu systems and buttons.

Friends nearby, friends faraway: Bluetooth a friend, phone number a friend, and text-message-based friending will feel new and Nintendo Network can provide for the old. Friending has to be wide and flexible for Animal Crossing on iOS and Android.

Animal Crossing: New Leaves: if Animal Crossing doesn’t entirely evolve, it will at least monetize an incredible iteration. Random drops or “lootboxing” seems oddly predictable. I think iOS and Android Animal Crossing will maintain much of what makes the series satisfying: a great grind. The mobile Animal Crossing grind will feature greater emphasis on an economy disconnected from Tom Nook, I hope.

While we’ll know a lot more about Animal Crossing Mobile tomorrow after 15 minutes of Direct-from-Nintendo YouTube, this speculative list should hit more marks than I think it will.

For more Animal Crossing iOS and Android coverage, like or reblog this post.

[firehawk12]

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Angels in America is an interesting play for me because it was one that I studied back when I was an undergrad. I still remember being entranced by it when I read it because of how cinematic it appeared on the page (Perestroika in particular). Yes, many of Shakespeare’s plays have the same qualities, as we’ve seen with the countless film adaptations of his work, but Angels read like a movie script instead of a stage play.

The HBO miniseries certainly added to that particular understanding of the play, with its big Hollywood cast (Al Pacino and Meryl Streep!) and location shooting (although it’s metaphorical Heaven leaves a bit to be desired), so I was excited when I saw that National Theatre Live was going to produce the play as a part of its series this year. I was finally going to have the chance to see how the stage can be made into a “live” cinematic experience.

I put live in quotes because the National Theatre Live experience does compromise the experience of a play in the expected manner — the relationship between the audience and the actors is mediated by the cameras, and because I live in Canada, the performance is live to tape. There were times when it felt like the actors were positioned and blocked for the cameras rather than for the live audience.

But that caveat aside, I was mesmerized by the stage design. Millennium Approaches was presented in a minimalist fashion for the bulk of the play. The three positions of the stage were divided into three smaller stages placed on rotating platforms, effectively allowing them to have nine or more different stage configurations at any time. This staging is used beautifully in the scene were Harper and Joe’s scene crosses over into Louis and Prior’s scene. The scenes are meant to happen simultaneously, and in the film context there are many ways to use editing to convey that effect — the Mike Nichols HBO adaptation simply cuts between the two scenes — but this adaptation has the four characters on stage at the same time, with the two corresponding pairs of characters standing in opposition to each other (Joe and Louis as the “villains”, Harper and Prior as the ones being wronged). It’s a wonderfully staged and directed sequence that connects the two stories together in a visual manner.

When Harper enters her Valium induced hallucination and travels to Antarctica with Mr Lies, she “breaks the frame” and moves down stage. A change of lighting hides the sets upstage and you are immediately sympathetic with how she chose to escape the reality of her husband’s closeted homosexuality by being transported to Antarctica with her. All of that with a simple stage direction and lighting changes.

Perestroika’s staging is much more dynamic, but that also reflects the more fantastical nature of the second half of the play. Instead of three rotating platforms on the center of the stage, we see stagehands dressed in black hurriedly scurry across the stage to change the set under the cover of darkness. Even though you can see the stage change before your eyes, the activity helps create a sense of urgency, as each of the stories in the play reach their climax. The stage is also three dimensional — when Prior successfully wrestles the angel and ascends to heaven, he climbs a set of stairs that are slowly raised to the rafters. Moments later, we set a set of stairs pop up from the bottom of the stage and Prior climbs up into heaven itself.

The Angel America is similarly dynamic. In this adaptation, she is carried by several actors in black (credited as Angel Shadows) to give her the illusion of flight, with two other actors flapping her wings. Although you can’t clearly see the actors carrying the Angel, they also don’t pretend that the actors don’t exist. When the Angel is on the ground, you see the Shadows crawling around the ground beside her, giving her an ethereal quality that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. Certainly this version of the Angel was more interesting to look at than the version we see in the HBO adaptation (simply Emma Thompson in a blue dress with wings).

Admittedly I’ve read more plays than I’ve seen, so my experience with theatre has always been theoretical rather than practical, but seeing a production of Angels in America has opened my eyes to the qualities of theatre that I haven’t really considered. Even though the stage is by definition a static and fixed space, it can still be as dynamic as film. Once you give in to the experience of watching the play, your mind fills in the gaps that would otherwise be filled in a film adaptation. It’s very much in line with Scott McCloud’s theories developed in Understanding Comics, where the imagination fills in the information between the panels. Yes the staging is quite minimalist, but you don’t need anything more a park bench and the sounds of traffic to understand that you are watching scene set in Brooklyn.

I’ve avoided talking about the play itself because I don’t know if I have anything particularly insightful to add to the greater conversation. In the ten or fifteen years since I’ve read it, it’s become a staple of drama courses and academic essays (when Sparknotes and Schmoop have study guides for the play, you know it’s mainstream now). This particular production has also been covered by many of the big outlets, perhaps in part because it stars Andrew Garfield, and I’ve already seen writers trying to make it seem as if it was a contemporary play (Roy Cohn advised Trump). I can see some of the parallels — as America lumbers through the Trump presidency, people have begun to question the nature of America as a project, and the play certainly asks and demands audiences to think about what America represents. For me, the play is very much tied to its time — not just because of when it was set, or the almost naive optimism of the end of the play (Gorbachev’s Perestroika leading to an authoritarian government controlled by oil billionaires was probably not what people expected from the end of the cold war), but because of what queer identity meant at the time. Obviously the battles aren’t over, as Trump’s latest attack against trans soldiers in the military show, but for gay men in the 80s, the very nature of their existence was being questioned. It wasn’t a question of rights — these were men facing extinction. So the hopeful message at the end of the play is meant to be a requiem for the dead, but also an understanding that life will continue. For a play produced in the early 90s, this would have been a powerful message.

I will say, the one aspect of Angels in America that has always stuck with me is how it uses religion. It treats the mythology of the bible as if it were real, so it’s not a question of faith, but a question of why “God” has abandoned humanity. Kushner’s answer to “why do bad things happen to good people?” is that God has simply walked away from his obligations to humanity and heaven, leaving everyone to fend for themselves. I think in this context, the use of Mormonism is apt, since it’s a uniquely American version of the Judeo-Christian mythology that has come to define the “old world”. If America is meant to represent the movement of human civilization, then featuring the newest iteration of the Jesus mythology makes perfect sense. The answer to God’s abandonment is to be in motion, to look forward, and that includes moving past what we assume to be true of God.

This religious aspect of the play has always been in my mind because I read Garth Ennis’ Preacher around the same time as I read the play. I won’t spoil what happens at the end of Preacher, but needless to say that it is also about how God has abandoned his responsibility to his creations and how we must learn to accept and respond to that fact. What specifically made me connect the two seemingly disparate texts was a speech that I remember Roy Cohn making at the end, when he decides to sue God on behalf of the Angels he abandoned:

Paternity suit? Abandonment? Family court is my particular metier, I’m an absolute fucking demon with Family Law. Just tell me who the judge is, and what kind of jewelry does he like? If it’s a jury, it’s harder, juries take more talk but sometimes it’s worth it, going jury, for what it saves you in bribes. Yes I will represent you, King of the Universe, yes I will sing and eviscerate, I will bully and seduce, I will win for you and make the plaintiffs, those traitors, wish they had never heard the name of . . . (Huge thunderclap) Is it a done deal, are we on? Good, then I gotta start by telling you you ain’t got a case here, you’re guilty as hell, no question, you have nothing to plead but not to worry, darling, I will make something up.

I was confused when this performance of Perestroika did not include this scene, since having Roy agree to defend God in court is diametrically opposed to what the Saint of Killers does to God at the end of Preacher. Then I saw Kushner state this in the definitive version of the play text:

In previous published versions of Perestroika I included two scenes which were almost always cut in production. In preparing this new version, I decided it was time to acknowledge the verdict of twenty-two years of production history and remove the scenes from the play. I’m including them here for whatever enjoyment and interest they provide readers; the play in production unquestionably works better without them (2013).

(The other scene removed from Perestroika is the one where Prior meets Louis’ grandmother).

I’ll concede that the scene does take away from the final moments of the play, which is redemptive and all about hope. We don’t need to know whether or not God will return, because we will move on with or without him — just as the gay community has developed and grown from the AIDS crisis of the 80s. Indeed, the fact that this play seems dated at times is a testament to how much progress has been made since it was first produced. That said, it’s still a very memorable scene to me because it makes God a “real person”, whatever that might mean, and at least acknowledges that he is accountable for the damage he has done through his neglect of his creation.

I enjoyed revisiting the play, since it was one of the big reasons I developed an interest in drama. Being able to finally see it come to life over a decade later was a bit of a revelation, showing me how powerful live theatre can be and why it still has a place in a world dominated by screens.

The National Theatre Live experience is a decent compromise — it’s still a mediated experience, and your viewing experience is left to the whim of the director, but knowing that the experience is live (or even live to tape) allows for that urgent energy to capture your attention. It solves a long-standing problem I have with live theatre, that it should be recorded and made accessible to more people, and I can only hope that eventually theatre companies will begin to sell performances for home exhibition.

(There will be a North American encore of Millennium Approaches on August 5th and of Perestroika on August 13th at select theatres)

[pauldeckerus]

10 Pro Tips for Taking Your Drone Photography to New Heights

Ever since I began traveling for work, I’ve looked for ways to capture the beauty of planet Earth from above. As early as the 1990s, I began experimenting with every alternative imaginable: ultralights, helicopters, seaplanes, hot air balloons and hang gliders. For me, the drone was simply a dream that materialized in front of me – the beginning of a new era that opened all the doors I desired and freeing me in my search for new photographic elements, perspectives, and composition.

The advent of drone photography also gave me a newfound interest in shooting video. In 30 years of photography, I had always avoided it. But in working with drones, I was inspired even more than photography itself by video’s dynamic qualities and found myself excited to seek perfection in motion and enjoy the challenge and focus required to coordinate the eyes, hands, and mind.

I began my drone career with the DJI Phantom 1, then the 2, 3, 4 and 4 Pro, as well as the Mavic Pro, the 2 Pro, 2 Zoom and the Parrot Anafi. Since 2016, when the reliability and quality of drones finally satisfied my every need, I began flying everywhere and have since shot with drones in 17 countries around the world for my project, “Over the Horizon.”

I increasingly specialize in extreme environments with flights as long as possible. In a multitude of environments, including glaciers, icebergs, waterfalls, geysers, deserts, steppes, savannahs, oceans, coral reefs, and volcanoes, I’ve tested the limits. I’ve flown beyond the 80th latitude north, at 20 degrees below zero, reached a flight distance of than 3.5 kilometers and even reached the altitude threshold of 1,500 meters in order to capture the beauty of Madagascar’s stunning Nosy Iranja islands, never seen from such a view before then.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve also flown just 30 meters from the mouth of Stromboli’s erupting volcano and the glowing Lava of Sicily’s Mt. Etna.

Here are 10 of my tips:

1. The first rule of drone flight is to think about security, not so much that of the drone but people. For this reason, despite having pushed the drone beyond all limits, I generally never fly in close proximity of people and avoid crowds & gatherings and, if possible, even cities, unless working on a special assignment that requires and allows for such footage.

2. The second rule could be defined as the Steve McCurry philosophy — rules are meant to be broken. But in drone work as with traditional photography, the same basic principle applies: rules must be learned before they can be broken. That said, despite having earned two drone pilot license certifications, I do exactly the opposite of one rule taught in such courses (taking into account the remote areas in which I typically fly) and that is the much-discussed rule of keeping the drone in sight! The VLOS flight (Visual Line of Sight) is really only necessary when flying very close to subjects near your take-off point. Otherwise, in order to have maximum control of the craft and fully immerse yourself in a flight while making images, you must work in total harmony with your remote without ever looking away from your screen/phone. For maximum efficiency when returning for a landing, manually turn the nose of the drone towards yourself so you can see what the drone sees. Using the DJI Go 4 App, follow the map and direct the arrow towards the starting point. Also, if you are flying from a boat, remember to set the remote control for the dynamic starting point and not the static one for RTH (Return to Home) — otherwise your drone may land in the water!

3. Although drones are increasingly sophisticated and equipped with smart batteries, my advice is to always check the status of batteries and cells, especially at the outset of a flight. Before taking off, allow the drone to hover for a few seconds, then try pitching and rolling in all 4 directions with your sticks to make sure the drone remains stable. In case of missions at low temperatures (-20 degrees Celsius/-4 degrees Fahrenheit and below), it is a good idea to keep the batteries warm and perhaps add a hand-warmer, attached with simple tape, while flying. Also, never put batteries in checked baggage while traveling by air, but always carry them with you in your hand baggage. Discharge the batteries to avoid any risk of fire on board (see Samsung Note 7 combustion problems for reference).

4. Beyond the batteries, the other fundamental element for ensuring a successful return of the drone to home base is the compass. Rather, “compasses” as there are two redundant units. So every time you proceed, always perform the compass calibration step first, especially if you are working in a country different from the previous flight. The worst message that your drone can give you is “compass error” which means that it can literally lose the compass and its orientation, and even the RTH function will not work. In this case, your only recourse is to try to turn off the GPS and, if the drone is not too far away, bring it back in “ATTI (Attitude) mode which, especially in windy conditions, is not easy. DJI suggests never flying beyond the 70th parallel north due to its proximity to the magnetic and geomagnetic north pole that affects the compasses. DJI is certainly right. In fact, one of my drones goes “crazy” precisely at the 80th parallel but the arctic beauty that can be captured at those extreme latitudes is well worth every risk!

5. For video, even more so than for still shots, it is absolutely recommended, even mandatory, to use a neutral density (ND) filter. It’s best to have an entire series of ND 4 to 32 on hand so you can easily choose the right one depending on the lighting conditions and type of landscape below (sea, forest, ice, sand, etc.). To create video that is as smooth and fluid as possible, especially during flight motion, it is ideal to shoot at 25 or 50 FPS (frames per second). Therefore, especially for drone models that do not have an aperture control setting, it is absolutely essential to decrease the amount of light that the camera will read in order for the shutter to reduce its speed at the above values ​​accordingly.

6. Night flying is always the riskiest as you can never rely entirely on the sensors that work in the daytime, nor on the four sides when flying in manual mode because at night they auto-switch off completely. The easiest way to keep an eye on the drone is to place the bicycle lights on the drone arms.

7. Pay particular attention while flying in strong wind conditions. Always use the anemometer to understand if the wind is over 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour) and never take off from the ground but always from the hand accompanying the launch of the drone itself. It’s always best to fly against the wind so that even in the worst-case scenario, the drone will still be pushed in your direction. In case of rain, it is always best to avoid flying altogether, not so much for the protection of the engines, as for the camera lens, as drops of water falling on the lens will render the shots and especially video, unusable.

8. I once flew over a huge area of terraced rice fields in China and landed with 1% battery! Apart from that it is absolutely not recommended, mainly due to the stress on the batteries that should never get so low. However, you must take into account that at 20% the drone will signal Return to Home (RTH) but once the battery charge drops below 10% the drone will begin to automatically descend wherever you are, still trying to land. Only by pushing the control of the engines can you can keep it at altitude, but this is very difficult to manage, especially if you are not used to performing the maneuver and the scenario is best avoided. Always set the altitude of the RTH depending on where you are. It’s best to stay high to avoid any risk of collision and I personally set my default at 100 meters.

9. Learn to fly your drone in full-manual mode, especially while handling the most demanding maneuvers. This is the only in this way to become fully skilled and to accomplish special effects. For example, rotations on static central subjects like the beautiful dolly zoom effect that, if managed manually, often makes the difference in mediocre versus great footage. To be “good” you should be able to manage 3 manual stick movements simultaneously. In order to achieve “phenomenal” status, you must get to 4!

10. Last but not least, always take at least two if not three drones with you to a shooting location, because conditions and flight events are always unpredictable. This is especially critical in remote locations. If you are working in the Mongolian taiga, for example, or filming above the reefs of Raja Ampat, immediate solutions will be difficult, if not impossible. Remember that every flight could be the last one. For this reason, I change the SD card and battery at the end of each mission. I also recommend that you download the streaming video data via your app, at least. By doing this you can ensure that even in a worst-case scenario, at least your video, even if it is low quality, will not be totally lost. With this, I wish you good fun and good flights! And above all, remember the first rule — respect for people and their safety must always come first.

About the author: In 32 years of photography and reportage, Italian photojournalist, explorer, and television producer Luca Bracali has traveled to 141 countries documenting the world’s most fragile ecosystems and threatened cultures. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Bracali specializes in arctic exploration and is a licensed drone pilot, a Fuji X-Photographer and lifetime Ambassador for “Save the Planet,” a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of environmental issues. The author of 13 books, Bracali is a frequent National Geographic contributor and has enjoyed more than 50 solo shows worldwide, including an exhibition at European Parliament highlighting the global impacts of climate change. You can find more of his work on his website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/02/05/10-pro-tips-for-taking-your-drone-photography-to-new-heights/

[sailorrrvenus]

10 Pro Tips for Taking Your Drone Photography to New Heights

Ever since I began traveling for work, I’ve looked for ways to capture the beauty of planet Earth from above. As early as the 1990s, I began experimenting with every alternative imaginable: ultralights, helicopters, seaplanes, hot air balloons and hang gliders. For me, the drone was simply a dream that materialized in front of me – the beginning of a new era that opened all the doors I desired and freeing me in my search for new photographic elements, perspectives, and composition.

The advent of drone photography also gave me a newfound interest in shooting video. In 30 years of photography, I had always avoided it. But in working with drones, I was inspired even more than photography itself by video’s dynamic qualities and found myself excited to seek perfection in motion and enjoy the challenge and focus required to coordinate the eyes, hands, and mind.

I began my drone career with the DJI Phantom 1, then the 2, 3, 4 and 4 Pro, as well as the Mavic Pro, the 2 Pro, 2 Zoom and the Parrot Anafi. Since 2016, when the reliability and quality of drones finally satisfied my every need, I began flying everywhere and have since shot with drones in 17 countries around the world for my project, “Over the Horizon.”

I increasingly specialize in extreme environments with flights as long as possible. In a multitude of environments, including glaciers, icebergs, waterfalls, geysers, deserts, steppes, savannahs, oceans, coral reefs, and volcanoes, I’ve tested the limits. I’ve flown beyond the 80th latitude north, at 20 degrees below zero, reached a flight distance of than 3.5 kilometers and even reached the altitude threshold of 1,500 meters in order to capture the beauty of Madagascar’s stunning Nosy Iranja islands, never seen from such a view before then.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve also flown just 30 meters from the mouth of Stromboli’s erupting volcano and the glowing Lava of Sicily’s Mt. Etna.

Here are 10 of my tips:

1. The first rule of drone flight is to think about security, not so much that of the drone but people. For this reason, despite having pushed the drone beyond all limits, I generally never fly in close proximity of people and avoid crowds & gatherings and, if possible, even cities, unless working on a special assignment that requires and allows for such footage.

2. The second rule could be defined as the Steve McCurry philosophy — rules are meant to be broken. But in drone work as with traditional photography, the same basic principle applies: rules must be learned before they can be broken. That said, despite having earned two drone pilot license certifications, I do exactly the opposite of one rule taught in such courses (taking into account the remote areas in which I typically fly) and that is the much-discussed rule of keeping the drone in sight! The VLOS flight (Visual Line of Sight) is really only necessary when flying very close to subjects near your take-off point. Otherwise, in order to have maximum control of the craft and fully immerse yourself in a flight while making images, you must work in total harmony with your remote without ever looking away from your screen/phone. For maximum efficiency when returning for a landing, manually turn the nose of the drone towards yourself so you can see what the drone sees. Using the DJI Go 4 App, follow the map and direct the arrow towards the starting point. Also, if you are flying from a boat, remember to set the remote control for the dynamic starting point and not the static one for RTH (Return to Home) — otherwise your drone may land in the water!

3. Although drones are increasingly sophisticated and equipped with smart batteries, my advice is to always check the status of batteries and cells, especially at the outset of a flight. Before taking off, allow the drone to hover for a few seconds, then try pitching and rolling in all 4 directions with your sticks to make sure the drone remains stable. In case of missions at low temperatures (-20 degrees Celsius/-4 degrees Fahrenheit and below), it is a good idea to keep the batteries warm and perhaps add a hand-warmer, attached with simple tape, while flying. Also, never put batteries in checked baggage while traveling by air, but always carry them with you in your hand baggage. Discharge the batteries to avoid any risk of fire on board (see Samsung Note 7 combustion problems for reference).

4. Beyond the batteries, the other fundamental element for ensuring a successful return of the drone to home base is the compass. Rather, “compasses” as there are two redundant units. So every time you proceed, always perform the compass calibration step first, especially if you are working in a country different from the previous flight. The worst message that your drone can give you is “compass error” which means that it can literally lose the compass and its orientation, and even the RTH function will not work. In this case, your only recourse is to try to turn off the GPS and, if the drone is not too far away, bring it back in “ATTI (Attitude) mode which, especially in windy conditions, is not easy. DJI suggests never flying beyond the 70th parallel north due to its proximity to the magnetic and geomagnetic north pole that affects the compasses. DJI is certainly right. In fact, one of my drones goes “crazy” precisely at the 80th parallel but the arctic beauty that can be captured at those extreme latitudes is well worth every risk!

5. For video, even more so than for still shots, it is absolutely recommended, even mandatory, to use a neutral density (ND) filter. It’s best to have an entire series of ND 4 to 32 on hand so you can easily choose the right one depending on the lighting conditions and type of landscape below (sea, forest, ice, sand, etc.). To create video that is as smooth and fluid as possible, especially during flight motion, it is ideal to shoot at 25 or 50 FPS (frames per second). Therefore, especially for drone models that do not have an aperture control setting, it is absolutely essential to decrease the amount of light that the camera will read in order for the shutter to reduce its speed at the above values ​​accordingly.

6. Night flying is always the riskiest as you can never rely entirely on the sensors that work in the daytime, nor on the four sides when flying in manual mode because at night they auto-switch off completely. The easiest way to keep an eye on the drone is to place the bicycle lights on the drone arms.

7. Pay particular attention while flying in strong wind conditions. Always use the anemometer to understand if the wind is over 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour) and never take off from the ground but always from the hand accompanying the launch of the drone itself. It’s always best to fly against the wind so that even in the worst-case scenario, the drone will still be pushed in your direction. In case of rain, it is always best to avoid flying altogether, not so much for the protection of the engines, as for the camera lens, as drops of water falling on the lens will render the shots and especially video, unusable.

8. I once flew over a huge area of terraced rice fields in China and landed with 1% battery! Apart from that it is absolutely not recommended, mainly due to the stress on the batteries that should never get so low. However, you must take into account that at 20% the drone will signal Return to Home (RTH) but once the battery charge drops below 10% the drone will begin to automatically descend wherever you are, still trying to land. Only by pushing the control of the engines can you can keep it at altitude, but this is very difficult to manage, especially if you are not used to performing the maneuver and the scenario is best avoided. Always set the altitude of the RTH depending on where you are. It’s best to stay high to avoid any risk of collision and I personally set my default at 100 meters.

9. Learn to fly your drone in full-manual mode, especially while handling the most demanding maneuvers. This is the only in this way to become fully skilled and to accomplish special effects. For example, rotations on static central subjects like the beautiful dolly zoom effect that, if managed manually, often makes the difference in mediocre versus great footage. To be “good” you should be able to manage 3 manual stick movements simultaneously. In order to achieve “phenomenal” status, you must get to 4!

10. Last but not least, always take at least two if not three drones with you to a shooting location, because conditions and flight events are always unpredictable. This is especially critical in remote locations. If you are working in the Mongolian taiga, for example, or filming above the reefs of Raja Ampat, immediate solutions will be difficult, if not impossible. Remember that every flight could be the last one. For this reason, I change the SD card and battery at the end of each mission. I also recommend that you download the streaming video data via your app, at least. By doing this you can ensure that even in a worst-case scenario, at least your video, even if it is low quality, will not be totally lost. With this, I wish you good fun and good flights! And above all, remember the first rule — respect for people and their safety must always come first.

About the author: In 32 years of photography and reportage, Italian photojournalist, explorer, and television producer Luca Bracali has traveled to 141 countries documenting the world’s most fragile ecosystems and threatened cultures. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Bracali specializes in arctic exploration and is a licensed drone pilot, a Fuji X-Photographer and lifetime Ambassador for “Save the Planet,” a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of environmental issues. The author of 13 books, Bracali is a frequent National Geographic contributor and has enjoyed more than 50 solo shows worldwide, including an exhibition at European Parliament highlighting the global impacts of climate change. You can find more of his work on his website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/02/05/10-pro-tips-for-taking-your-drone-photography-to-new-heights/

[how2to18]

IN SEPTEMBER 2016, author Todd Miller and I had planned an investigative trip to the Middle East trailing a labyrinth of state-corporate border intrigue. As writers focusing on US-Mexico borderlands issues, we had been closely following an emergent, free trade–modeled border-security-industrial complex whose publicly funded research and development leadership was based in Southern Arizona but fused a corporate manufacturing base in Sonora, Mexico, with a prospective Israeli high-tech security company clientele.

Shortly before our trip, we learned of yet another piece to the puzzle: the Obama administration had awarded the arms giant Raytheon half a billion dollars to build a 287-mile electronic barrier-surveillance zone along Jordan’s northern and eastern boundaries with Syria and Iraq, as well as a small triangular border area where Jordan, Israel, and Syria converge.

Given Jordan’s longtime military exchange program in Southern Arizona, along with a Raytheon division also based in the region, we decided to expand our overseas trip to dig into this enigmatic amalgam of state and corporate border projects — spanning both sides of the Jordan River — to see where it leads us.

As it turned out, we spent our time speaking with those who cross borders and tracking down those who build them.

The trip was punctuated, at times, by confrontations with paranoid or obtuse boundary forces. One such incident occurred at the Israeli-controlled Sheikh Hussein border crossing while we were returning, circuitously, from Amman, Jordan, to the city of Ramallah in the Palestinian West Bank, where we were based most of the trip.

We were walking the long distance from the gate to the port building on the sort of dry summer day near the Sea of Galilee where the blistering sunshine overhead saps your energy. Although we could only guess it at the time (September 2016), we were in the middle of then the hottest year on record, in one of the regions hardest hit by a rapidly warming planet. Droughts east of the Jordan River are projected to double by 2100 CE in what is already one of the driest country on earth, where freshwater access reaches below levels of “absolute scarcity” as defined by water scientists. Todd was then researching his newest title, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, which just won him a 2018 Izzy Award for investigative journalism. As we traveled together, I got the chance to view our surroundings through his eyes while researching my own work on a climate sci-fi graphic novel exploring climate change and borders in the year 2100.

Inside the port building, which was typically empty of crossers that day, the cooler temperature gave us some momentary relief before what happened next. Uniformed Israeli border guards had waved Todd through the port, ahead of me, and ushered him outside the building. No sooner was Todd out of sight when one of the soldiers stopped me after searching my backpack, apparently discovering some high-interest items. As I craned my neck to see what objects piqued his concern, he pulled out all the books I carried for the journey: some pamphlet reports from an Israeli-Palestinian research organization, Who Profits, whose staff researchers we interviewed the week prior; Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle; Jeff Halper’s War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. And a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The guard stacked the books neatly in a pile on the static conveyer belt and walked over to his colleagues where they huddled for what seemed an extraordinarily long time, seldom looking my way but otherwise rapt in their conversation.

Todd later said he didn’t know what to do as he waited for me outside. What if they detained me long into the night, as they sometimes do?

But for me, what kept coursing through my mind was the similar tense encounter I had with the Jordanian secret police just days earlier. In between endless interviews and fatiguing day-trips to the Syrian border, Todd and I had taken a sightseeing walk from our hostel to the Roman Theatre, a historical landmark in downtown Amman. I sat writing in my diary on one of the giant stone steps at the base of the amphitheater. Having just finished the line, “I miss my friends,” and listed several names for whom I planned to bring some small trinkets to mark my visit, a shadow fell over my pages and I looked up at a group of three young men in plain-clothes pants and T-shirts, standing over me. They had me cornered, blocking every possible direction I could walk away, and demanded I show them my notebook and what I was writing.

The young men identified themselves as government agents. I didn’t have much cause to believe them until they reported with Jordanian military soldiers nearby who stood guard at the archway entrance. By then I had showed them my notebook pages while clutching deftly onto my knapsack. Not far away I saw Todd near the entryway standing helplessly, wondering what was going on. I shrugged at him quizzically.

Then, just as curt as the men approached me, they said I was free to go. I asked them, in English, why they detained me. They replied they thought I might graffiti the ancient theater stonework, disregarding the fact that my writing utensil of choice was a blue-ink ballpoint pen. Todd greeted me outside. I told him what happened. His reply: “Let’s get out of here. Seriously.” We quickened our step and spent part of the day looking over our shoulders.

Back at the Israeli port of entry now, I remembered Todd’s words from the amphitheater. I wanted to be out of there so that Todd, who was still waiting outside trying to guess when I’d show up, could say those words to me again: “Let’s get out of here.” After a while, the Israeli border guard gave me back my books and, just as tersely as his Jordanian counterparts, sent me on my way.

Todd and I should be used to these experiences, since this sort of thing happens at US-Mexico crossing points as well. But the more it happens to you — enduring nebulous security delays or mind games from laconic border guards — the more it reveals the reliable uncertainty of boundary enforcement. And the quailing, forbidding quality of 21st-century border policing from which seeking refuge is, naturally, one’s sensible next move.

¤

GABRIEL SCHIVONE: When the Israeli guard pulled me aside at the Sheikh Hussein port of entry and collected my books as if the books were a security threat — for you, how is this crossing point a dynamic location to witness the convergence of borders and climate change in your newest book, Storming the Wall? Plenty of people may not see a connection there.

TODD MILLER: It all comes down to witnessing borders, especially when slammed up against socioeconomic inequality and ecological disasters relating to climate change. In that crossing, we were very close to the Jordan Valley, which is going through increasingly severe droughts. We were also quite close to Syria, which is now almost famously known for its drought that occurred between 2006 and 2010, the worst in 900 years that climate scientists have connected with global warming. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the “impact and threat of climate-related hazards,” on average, displaced 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2015. Most of these climate-displaced people on the move internationally, without authorization, will sooner or later collide with the walls and armed border guards we met everywhere we went on our trip. A scenario of somebody fleeing such a situation to the Sheikh Hussein border crossing, or a border nearby, is not that much of a stretch. If you’re crossing borders, that port of entry is an example of where the global border system is heading. And Israel is the very country that’s leading the charge in terms of “homeland security,” walls, and the border surveillance systems that goes with them.

One of the things you always hear growing up in the United States is that you’re innocent until proven guilty. In a border situation, it almost feels like the opposite. You’re guilty until proven innocent. You have to prove your innocence to the authorities. But for them to target you, in a sense, it doesn’t matter who you are. They could suspect you of being from some sort of armed group or they just don’t like the way you think about things. And that’s clearly what was happening with the books. The fact that they looked through your bag with an X-ray machine and immediately opened it and pulled out the books, is what’s telling. The guards looked at my books, too. But, actually, in my case, I purposefully brought a book — I forgot what it was — but it was a book that wouldn’t raise any suspicion —

It was a tourist book.

Right, a tourist book and I also just had a novel, which I positioned at the top of my bag. The fact that the guards went straight for the books as if they were going straight for a weapon, is quite telling. “My word is my weapon,” as the proverb goes. And the fact that they took out your books, some of which described a worldview that was different from the dominant government narrative, is very important when it comes to this kind of bordered world, where the gap between “innocent” and “guilty” is whether you’re compliant or not compliant; between who’s considered a threat and who’s not considered a threat. And a criterion that’s being used is that you’re singled out and interrogated for books!

It’s also scary, too, because in that kind of situation, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I was waiting for you — probably only for 15 minutes but it seems longer when you’re waiting for your friend who’s not coming out and you’re wondering what happened. A startling thing about borders is that you can disappear into the system for a long time. Like the example just today, as we talk [June 23, 2018], the young French Canadian jogger, Cedella Roman, who accidentally crossed the Canadian border into the United States and was caught and detained by CBP [Customs and Border Protection] for two weeks! Two weeks in CBP custody, just because she jogged across the border and didn’t realize she was in another country.

You mentioned Israel leading the charge in homeland security. Everyone we had talked with over the past two weeks before we stepped foot into the Sheikh Hussein crossing, no matter their ideological position — from human rights workers and activists (both Palestinian and Israeli), to journalists and homeland security industrialists — all confirmed it for us. What does this tell you about how the high-selling “Israeli model” functions in the internationalization of borders that your forthcoming book, Empire of Borders, explores?

For one thing, per capita, Israel has the largest homeland security industry in the world. People in the business world know this, from Israel to Southern Arizona. Like when Bruce Wright, associate vice president of Tech Parks Arizona and their “Israeli Business Initiative,” told us that they look to Israel as an exemplar for their business model. Whereas Wright and his colleagues identified the largest “cluster” of border security companies in North America grouped here in Southern Arizona, he said, Israel has the largest security cluster in the world.

Every single piece of the technology deployed in the Palestinian West Bank or Gaza, or any sort of border situation under Israeli control, is simultaneously being showcased to the world. Just a few days ago, the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, toured the Israeli-Egyptian border, checking out the “smart walls” Israel has built there. They’re selling their products worldwide. They’re bringing the products that are used on Palestinians, in most cases, or to guard the border against Sudanese refugees and others in the region escaping ecological, economic, and political crises — what sociologist Christian Parenti calls the “catastrophic convergence” in the 21st century. And when the exclusion works — often violently — then it’s sold. It’s a high-selling point to the world, like you said. That’s exactly what’s happening.

Israel’s also not the only one building up its borders. With so many people on the move from Middle East and Africa, European Union countries have dug in their heels, creating enforcement budgets 50 times what they were in 2005.

A high-ranking Jordanian official, during an interview, told us the reason why Israel’s border is so strong is not only for US funding but Jordanian collaboration — which he said in a didactic tone suggesting that Jordan doesn’t get enough credit. How does Israeli-Jordanian border collaboration, and the United States being everywhere in the region, inform your concept of Empire of Borders?

I almost don’t even differentiate. Obviously, to some degree, there’s differentiation with Israel having the biggest per capita border industry, and the United States being everywhere. But the Jordanian border they’re erecting along Syria is practically impassable. From all the reports, they’re shooting at everything that moves that’s crossing the border, as the Jordanian official, who knew the boundary policies intimately, told us himself.

You mean the “great wall of Jordan” border zone being built by the Raytheon Company, which drew us into Jordan to follow that lead in the first place.

Right, it’s Raytheon, a US company, that’s building it. In one way you can differentiate it through different countries. In another way, you almost have to think of the world not divided by countries but divided into a transnational corporate nexus of elites within countries over which the United States and Israel play a huge part, versus the rest of us who aren’t supposed to play any part.

Is that what you mean by a border “empire” referring to the title of your forthcoming book? Are you talking about US empire or are you talking about this global nexus where, at some point, you don’t even differentiate?

I think we’re really talking about both now. When you talk about US empire, you think of a traditional territorial empire. The empire nation takes over and occupies other countries, utilizes their resources.

But in another way, we really have to challenge the concept of “empire” in the 21st century, which is something I learned while writing this next book. You have to ask: is it like a traditional territorial empire anymore? When you think of US international border cooperation worldwide, it’s not only proxies following orders. It’s also elite governments cooperating with other elite governments. They’re sharing intelligence and creating cross-border zones that are mostly going after the poor or whoever’s organizing from below. It’s not just a US phenomenon. In 1988, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls in the world. Now, according to border scholar Elisabeth Vallet, there’re 70. It’s both territory enforcement and cooperation within the state-corporate nexus.

In 21st-century “empire” terms, the nation-state has been reduced to a security role. Under neoliberalism everything else in the nation-state, all the basic services, has been cut. But at the same time, the security apparatus of the nation-state has been bolstered and built up. So, pretty much now the nation-state serves this transnational corporate class wherein corporations can cross borders freely but people can’t. If I have a mining company I can go set up shop in Mexico without any problem. I’m embraced by the system. But if I’m a person in that community who’s displaced because my children and I start drinking cyanide from the mining company’s processing chemicals, which has happened many times in the Global South, and then I cross into the United States — then I’m a criminal. That’s how the system is set up.

You’ve attended border security conferences all over the world, some we’ve attended together, such as a drone conference on our trip. But what was so unusual about the activist “shadow conference” that took place alongside a security conference that you attended in Tel Aviv some months later?

The shadow conference I attended in Tel Aviv was organized to protest the ISDEF conference [International Defense and Security Expo], Israel’s largest military and homeland security conference. The shadow conference happened in the same area and the organizers rallied a protest of ISDEF.

Normally these conferences just proceed without any contestation. There’s very little pushback on what’s going on. When lots of private sector gather in places like that, they’re there to sell their products. They’re not used to anything but enthusiasm for what they’re doing.

But this time, the ISDEF conference vendors, panelists, and attendees were getting questioned about — what I would argue as — the key questions of our age that we need to be asking.

Like what?

Like what sort of impacts an increasingly militarized world is having on people and on planet Earth, the sorts of violence it brings, and who’s profiting from it.

At the ISDEF shadow conference, I was thinking of the sort of energy and resources, money and profit-making that’s going to borders and militaries and making sure that the status quo, including the fossil fuel industry, remains as profitable as ever.

Yet there are so many other ways to spend that money to create a better world. The prevailing state-corporate wisdom is: Let’s put a wall here, let’s put a surveillance tower there. Instead, we should be asking: why aren’t we putting more energy into mitigating the impacts of climate change and adapting to it? Because climate change is the biggest threat that humankind is facing.

There are so many relatively inexpensive biological preservation and restoration projects that, if they saw even a fraction of the same funding as border enforcement budgets, could do wonders for the world. Not far from here, just east of Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora, the Cuenca Los Ojos organization has a water-harvesting project that uses gabions, steel cages filled with rocks, placed along the banks and beds of a nearby wash. The use of the gabions is an ancient technique to slow down the rushing rainwaters during the summer monsoon season; they act as sponges on the soil to replenish the diverse plant life, the flowing ponds and creeks, and the animal life in the shared ecosystems of the US-Mexico borderlands.

And it’s worked marvelously. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. In this parched area, amid a 15-year drought, the water table had risen 30 feet! To me, it was a miracle. It showed me that another “border wall” is possible, one that restores life instead of excludes it. We need more of these kinds of hopeful, practical examples of sustainability in an era where human survival is at stake.

¤

The above was edited from an interview conducted in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, June 23, 2018.

¤

Gabriel Schivone is the author of Making the New “Illegal”: How Decades of US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern Wave of Immigration(Prometheus Books, forthcoming). He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona and has been commissioned to produce his climate sci-fi graphic novel, Into the Sun.

The post The Border-Security-Industrial Complex: A Conversation with Todd Miller appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2P7dl81 via IFTTT

[amykingpoet]

BOOK REVIEW: THE MISSING MUSEUM BY AMY KING Reviewed by Emma Bolden @ Los Angeles Review

BOOK REVIEW: THE MISSING MUSEUM BY AMY KING Reviewed by Emma Bolden

The Missing Museum Poems by Amy King Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016 $14.00; 114 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1939460080

In February 2012, the Russian feminist punk/performance art/protest group Pussy Riot staged an act of protest against the re-election of Vladimir Putin. Between services at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox church destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, the women entered and walked up to the altar, jumping and jabbing their fists in the air. Filmed footage of the performance was included in the music video for their song, “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away.” The song implores the Virgin Mary to “banish Putin” and “become a feminist, we pray thee.” Although Cathedral guards removed the group in less than a minute, three group members were arrested, charged with hooliganism, and sentenced to two years in prison.

After the American election of 2016, Pussy Riot warned Americans to prepare themselves: Trump’s presidency, they predicted, would resemble Putin’s in ways that many Americans might not even be able to imagine. In a December 2016 interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova told New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg that it was “important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.’ [ . . . ] in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.” It isn’t safe, Tolokonnikova continued, to trust that America’s institutions will protect its citizens and their freedoms, as “a president has power to change institutions and a president moreover has power to change public perception of what is normal, which could lead to changing institutions.”

Pussy Riot’s work serves as a frame for Amy King’s riotous, rapturous, and radical fifth full-length collection, The Missing Museum. I mean “frame” quite literally: a passage from the poem that shares part of its title with the first section of the book, “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY,” is printed on the back cover. “I HAVE A WITCH-CHURCH HAND,” the speaker declares in the poem, “& / PUSSIES RIOTING A PUTIN PRAYER / ON A NATION OF PEOPLE.” Just as Pussy Riot composed the clarion call of an iconoclastic culture countering Russian authoritarianism and repression, so too does Amy King’s work spur, capture, and curate the artifacts of a burgeoning resistance movement in the United States.

Also like Pussy Riot, King’s use of the term “pussy” serves as a shibboleth for revolutionary feminism, reclaiming a term used as a slur against women—and, as the 2016 release of Access Hollywood footage shows, one often linked linguistically to sexual assault and rape. Through reclamation, feminists empty the term of its misogynistic implications, empowering themselves by taking ownership of the language of the oppressor. Now, “pussy” has become a common part of the American vernacular, wielded by women fighting to preserve their fundamental rights to control their own bodies and speech. Likewise, Pussy Riot’s music carries great meaning for the American resistance and for the poems in this collection, which serve, in many ways, as a museum preserving the gathering motion of resistance.

Unlike many museums, King’s isn’t a collection of evidence of an unchanging monolithic culture. Instead, the book protests the very idea that any culture or subculture is, was, or ever will be stable, static, and homogeneous. King’s poetry sweeps through cultural references from surrealist painter Leonora Carrington to soul singer and activist Nina Simone to pop singer Lionel Richie. The sheer breadth of references in King’s work echoes the idea that no culture is singular or stationary. The disparate works—songs, paintings, poems, acts of civil disobedience—of all of these artists cross through the collection as separate but equally essential works and workers of culture. As King writes in “You Make the Culture,” “The words become librarians, custodians of people.” If any representation of a culture is to be accurate, she continues, it is to involve movement: “I will walk with the sharks of our pigments / [ . . . ] until we leave rooms that hold us apart.” Inclusivity, and the ability to envision all groups in terms of belonging, is essential, as lines near the end of the poem show: “Nothing comes from the center / that doesn’t break most everything apart.”

After all, culture is the product of changeable, mutable human beings who, King argues in the collection’s prologue, “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea,” are more action than object: “Our limits may not be expandable, but before you say, / ‘Blood and sinew,’ remember you’re making a mistake. / We are not edges of limbs or the heart’s smarts only.” As such, a worthwhile life is a life beyond “noise,” beyond “dying full of money but no one will give a shit, rich asshole.” To be stationary, to live untroubled while following the American exhortation to gain money and power without examining the dangers this philosophy poses or the system purporting this philosophy, is anathema to progress. The poem ends with a couplet that brings to mind Herman Melville’s enjoinder at the end of “Art,” in which he calls for a fusion of opposites within the self and between the self and the heavens. “Be somebody,” King implores of us, “be one who wrestles and make love to the dark / that is your deepest part, the uselessness of love and art.” The idea that the most beautiful things we as human beings bring to the light—beauty, love, art—are utterly useless comes as a shock, especially as it also comes at the end of a gorgeously-wrought poem serving as the collection’s prologue. The location of these lines creates the same kind of shock as the location of Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” in an Orthodox cathedral. Both performances don’t just shock: they shift. The juxtaposition of lyric and location creates a moment in which the mind bends, allowing disparate realities to coexist.

King calls upon the work of the Surrealists to illustrate this juxtaposition. In “And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur,” a poem named after a painting by Surrealist Leonora Carrington, King writes of the need to move beyond accepted meanings, “to grow branches / between worlds on the backs of nurtured equations.” She calls for us to “[s]ay another elsewhere. Open the broom, sick with sorceries.” In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour,” King speaks of a woman traveling the Lexington Avenue Line while “hitting / herself, buck up head heavy against / the number 5 train downtown.” She describes her “self-infliction” as “a cause / that brings us away from our senses.” Here, King references Arthur Rimbaud, who called for poets to transform themselves into “seers” through a “long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”

King’s collection carries out Rimbaud’s call through the velocity of its juxtapositions, racing through shifts in voice, structure, theme, and tone, sometimes within the same poem. In “Understanding the Poem,” “this world is anything but a poem” —and then, in the next line, “This world is this, this world is poem, and I am unusual today, at least.” The frenetic movement of King’s work—from popular culture to high culture, from Georgia pines to New York streets, from all-caps alert to expertly-groomed almost-sonnets—recalls the cry of Baudelaire’s soul to travel “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!” The speed and span of juxtapositions in the collection reveals what is missing from museums: movement, derangement, change.

By this dynamic derangement of our assumptions about culture, King’s museum reveals what culture really is: an ever-changing multiplicity of perspectives that cannot be carved into different, disparate wings. The narrative of culture as a series of singular, separate factions and philosophies leads to the violence of othering and violence against others. In “Perspective,” this moves beyond theory to a matter of actual life and death:

When I see two cops laughing after one of them gets shot because this is TV and one says while putting pressure on the wound, Haha, you’re going to be fine, and the other says, I know, haha!, as the ambulance arrives— I know the men are white.

At the end of the poem, King asks us to wrestle with questions about this narrative, about the curation of our culture, essential for the survival of our nation and ourselves.

Who gets to see and who follows what script? I ask my students. Whose lines are these and by what hand are they written?

In that 2016 New York Times interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova herself echoed this idea: “‘You are always in danger of being shut down,’ she said. ‘But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.’” With her work and words, King shows her readers how to join the fight.

Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books 2013). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her honors include a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. She serves as Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-missing-museum-amy-king/

[webpostingpro-blog]

New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on http://webpostingpro.com/local-blogger-seeks-interview-subjects-for-project-on-interracial-relationships/

Local blogger seeks interview subjects for project on interracial relationships

The latest transplant to Walla Walla, Nathan Brannon is delving into a brand new podcast as host of The Hamster Village, which focuses on interracial relationships.

Nathan said he travels the country interviewing interracial couples and individuals and professionals in fields that intersect with interracial relationships.

He answers questions submitted via listeners at the show, holds activities to foster interracial wellness and has helped with legislative/social projects bearing on the multiracial community, he said in a release

He’s presently trying to find interracial couples and people within the Walla Walla region to be on the show.

Everybody has a story,” he said. “I just want to highlight the one’s tales that talk to racial concord, as opposed to struggle. What better area to appearance than the town I stay in?”

To get in contact, write the show on thehamstervillage.Com’s touch page, or ship a message at the display’s social media pages at Twitter or Facebook.

Nathan and wife Kirsten, who grew up here and attended Walla Walla High Faculty, have a son, Rowan.

Nathan may be acquainted with comedian aficionados as he performed in 2012 at the Melonville Comedy Festival in Hermiston

In 2016, he recorded his 2nd album, “Due to the fact,” with file label Kill Rock Stars.

He won the Seattle Global Comedy competition in 2014, become voted into the Willamette Week’s “Portland’s Funniest five” in his homeland of Portland for 2013, launched his first comedy album, “I Black Out,” in 2013, and changed into topped “Portland’s Funniest Character” in 2012. He has been featured on NPR, Fox, and NBC

How to Build Your Email List by Guest Blogging

Even as websites want site visitors to live on, weblog websites do too. Bloggers are continuously looking for new methods to improve traffic to their websites. Popular strategies include advertising, Seo, syndicating articles, and submitting posts to authoritative websites, consisting of eHow.Com and ezine articles,blogger sign in.blog log in

But some of these take time, cost money, or each.

As a result, increasingly Net entrepreneurs are turning to guest blogging to pressure traffic to their personal web pages. visitor blogging is whilst you write a weblog submit and offer it to any other blogger to submit on their blog. While this arrangement would not price either party any cash, it is able to be hugely beneficial to both.

So why would you need to put in writing on somebody else’s weblog free of charge? And why could a longtime blogger want to post your blog on their website? The solution to that question is straightforward: site visitors.

Construct Your Email List with the aid of visitor blogging

Win/Win for Blogger and guest visitor blogging benefits each the weblog’s host and the individual writing the guest blog. For the visitor, posting on an established blog can cause plenty of hobby from the host’s readers. If the visitor blog provides excessive-value content material, readers can also want click on the links to the guest bloggers internet site, products, and services.

For the host blogger, allowing a visitor blogger to submit on their blog allows them to offer excessive-price content to their readers without having to do anything themselves., They enjoy the same stage of site visitors while not having to analyze and create unique content material.

Creates New One-way links

Running a blog on a bunch blog additionally, allows guest bloggers to achieve new Backlinks to their touchdown pages. Readers who discover the content of the visitor weblog of price can comply with the hyperlinks returned to the guest blogger’s touchdown web page.

These hyperlinks also increase the cost of the touchdown web page within the eyes of the search engines like google – along with Google, Bing, and others. If the host blog site is considered to be an authoritative website with a terrific Alexa rank, Google specifically likes this. This authoritative backlink will increase the guest bloggers page ranking of their touchdown page.

Google wants to provide cost and significance to websites which have a lot of hyperlinks from authoritative websites. They distinguish Those websites as dependable and truthful so that they rank them at or near the pinnacle of the SERP (seek engine consequences web page) for his or her area of interest.

Choosing visitor Bloggers

Established bloggers need to pick out who they permit to write visitor blogs on their pages carefully. They need to ensure the visitor is going to present their readers beneficial and informative content material.

If the host blogger isn’t familiar with the visitor blogger, they can study them, and take a look at with other writers of their community. The host blogger can also ask the guest for credentials consisting of instructional ranges, or past enjoys. They can also ask for hyperlinks to preceding guest blogs.

Normal, the benefits of visitor blogging are several for both the host blogger and the visitor blogger.

Louis Althusser: Hailing, Interpellation, and the Subject of Mass Media

Whilst we stand and pressure, via contrivances of our own, the view of every other closer to our message, our verbal exchange, we are said to be hailing. It’s far to announce that we seek the attention of the opposite, that we are asking, if not annoying, that they pay immediate efforts to understand what It’s far we are saying. For the vital logician, Louis Althusser, the movement of the hair works nicely as a tool of evaluation within the context of verbal exchange research. That is to mention, Althusser’s conceptual framework offers a language via which we can discover and define the have an impact on the mass media exerts over the public.

In Althusser’s wondering, hegemonic ideology plays through and is, in fact, mechanized by, the messages of the mass media. This is to say, if ideologies exist in the very apparatuses and practices of the cultural establishments of the dominant forces (the Kingdom), then in a laissez-faire capitalist society those institutions must encompass the progenitors and disseminators of the messages of mass media. For instance, we increasingly more see the power of the media to form messages of recognition, of the arts, and of conflict. thru the usage of the mass media, people do now not recognise their subjection; as a substitute, they agree with they may be taking part in ritual practices (including balloting in national elections for presidents, or on American Idol for singers) in order to be a person who acts in keeping with their ideas. As opposed to a few kind of static idea set that the dominant proscribes for the subjected to assume and agree with, ideology is a very dynamic manner This is continuously reproducing and reconstituting in actual exercise

Althusser refers to this transformation mechanism as interpellation.

As It is knowledgeable by means of the practice of the mass media, marketing is an excellent vehicle for the translation of the process. For Althusser, interpolation starts of evolved with hailing–a heralding to enroll in at the proposition to hand. For advertising and marketing, this could be the promise of the product as it implies to imbue the patron with unique and socially suitable traits–stunning skin, an envy of others, protection for family, and so forth. Upon those propositions, the hail of the commercial works to recruit topics into its dominant machine. The mass media message calls out, hails, to the viewer and as interest is gathered and solidified, objectifies the viewer through their general reputation of the ideological proposition, and in doing so interpolates them into the ideological machine. Ultimately, successfully interpolated topics do now not understand their subjection, only that they have freely selected to emerge as element and parcel of the dominant ideology.

Stock Images to Boost Your Project

Stock photos are used very broadly in recent times. They’re used by groups or those who increase web sites, bloggers, photo designers, advertising groups, and information organizations, and so on. They can be procured from photo web sites. There are some of the Inventory photograph websites available. A number of them offer pix free of charge while a few are paid web sites.

A Stock photograph internet site is likewise known as a Stock employer. It has photographs captured by way of expert photographers of not unusual locations, landmarks, nature, activities or human beings, and so on.

Inventory images can be procured from companies totally free or via deciding to buy the prison rights for his or her utilization.

The exclusive approaches wherein Stock photographs can be procured through the person are:

Public Area

Whilst an image is to be had in public Domain, it implies that it is able to be used free of price. The person does now not want a license for the use of them. Those images can be used for business and personal functions.

Rights Managed

A rights Controlled photograph is one wherein the way to apply it’s miles specified via the Stock corporation. For instance, the picture size and resolution, geographical region of utilization, the period of time of usage, can be precise. it could be used by a unmarried user or multiple customers.

Royalty Free

There’s a extra flexibility provided While Royalty Loose photos are used. Royalty-Free implies paying a one-time rate for non-special lifelong use of the photograph. You may decide a way to use the image, how typically to apply it, how lengthy to use it, the range of tasks You could use it for, etc. You only need to comply with the license agreement.

But, there are sure restrictions on their usage.

• The snap shots can not be resold or transferred to some other proprietor. • pix need to no longer be utilized in an offensive way. • There will be a restriction on the number of copies used. • These pictures can be utilized by a couple of users.

Extended License:

[amykingpoet]

amy king

BOOK REVIEW: THE MISSING MUSEUM BY AMY KING Reviewed by Emma Bolden

The Missing Museum Poems by Amy King Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016 $14.00; 114 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1939460080

In February 2012, the Russian feminist punk/performance art/protest group Pussy Riot staged an act of protest against the re-election of Vladimir Putin. Between services at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox church destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, the women entered and walked up to the altar, jumping and jabbing their fists in the air. Filmed footage of the performance was included in the music video for their song, “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away.” The song implores the Virgin Mary to “banish Putin” and “become a feminist, we pray thee.” Although Cathedral guards removed the group in less than a minute, three group members were arrested, charged with hooliganism, and sentenced to two years in prison.

After the American election of 2016, Pussy Riot warned Americans to prepare themselves: Trump’s presidency, they predicted, would resemble Putin’s in ways that many Americans might not even be able to imagine. In a December 2016 interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova told New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg that it was “important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.’ [ . . . ] in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.” It isn’t safe, Tolokonnikova continued, to trust that America’s institutions will protect its citizens and their freedoms, as “a president has power to change institutions and a president moreover has power to change public perception of what is normal, which could lead to changing institutions.”

Pussy Riot’s work serves as a frame for Amy King’s riotous, rapturous, and radical fifth full-length collection, The Missing Museum. I mean “frame” quite literally: a passage from the poem that shares part of its title with the first section of the book, “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY,” is printed on the back cover. “I HAVE A WITCH-CHURCH HAND,” the speaker declares in the poem, “& / PUSSIES RIOTING A PUTIN PRAYER / ON A NATION OF PEOPLE.” Just as Pussy Riot composed the clarion call of an iconoclastic culture countering Russian authoritarianism and repression, so too does Amy King’s work spur, capture, and curate the artifacts of a burgeoning resistance movement in the United States.

Also like Pussy Riot, King’s use of the term “pussy” serves as a shibboleth for revolutionary feminism, reclaiming a term used as a slur against women—and, as the 2016 release of Access Hollywood footage shows, one often linked linguistically to sexual assault and rape. Through reclamation, feminists empty the term of its misogynistic implications, empowering themselves by taking ownership of the language of the oppressor. Now, “pussy” has become a common part of the American vernacular, wielded by women fighting to preserve their fundamental rights to control their own bodies and speech. Likewise, Pussy Riot’s music carries great meaning for the American resistance and for the poems in this collection, which serve, in many ways, as a museum preserving the gathering motion of resistance.

Unlike many museums, King’s isn’t a collection of evidence of an unchanging monolithic culture. Instead, the book protests the very idea that any culture or subculture is, was, or ever will be stable, static, and homogeneous. King’s poetry sweeps through cultural references from surrealist painter Leonora Carrington to soul singer and activist Nina Simone to pop singer Lionel Richie. The sheer breadth of references in King’s work echoes the idea that no culture is singular or stationary. The disparate works—songs, paintings, poems, acts of civil disobedience—of all of these artists cross through the collection as separate but equally essential works and workers of culture. As King writes in “You Make the Culture,” “The words become librarians, custodians of people.” If any representation of a culture is to be accurate, she continues, it is to involve movement: “I will walk with the sharks of our pigments / [ . . . ] until we leave rooms that hold us apart.” Inclusivity, and the ability to envision all groups in terms of belonging, is essential, as lines near the end of the poem show: “Nothing comes from the center / that doesn’t break most everything apart.”

After all, culture is the product of changeable, mutable human beings who, King argues in the collection’s prologue, “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea,” are more action than object: “Our limits may not be expandable, but before you say, / ‘Blood and sinew,’ remember you’re making a mistake. / We are not edges of limbs or the heart’s smarts only.” As such, a worthwhile life is a life beyond “noise,” beyond “dying full of money but no one will give a shit, rich asshole.” To be stationary, to live untroubled while following the American exhortation to gain money and power without examining the dangers this philosophy poses or the system purporting this philosophy, is anathema to progress. The poem ends with a couplet that brings to mind Herman Melville’s enjoinder at the end of “Art,” in which he calls for a fusion of opposites within the self and between the self and the heavens. “Be somebody,” King implores of us, “be one who wrestles and make love to the dark / that is your deepest part, the uselessness of love and art.” The idea that the most beautiful things we as human beings bring to the light—beauty, love, art—are utterly useless comes as a shock, especially as it also comes at the end of a gorgeously-wrought poem serving as the collection’s prologue. The location of these lines creates the same kind of shock as the location of Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” in an Orthodox cathedral. Both performances don’t just shock: they shift. The juxtaposition of lyric and location creates a moment in which the mind bends, allowing disparate realities to coexist.

King calls upon the work of the Surrealists to illustrate this juxtaposition. In “And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur,” a poem named after a painting by Surrealist Leonora Carrington, King writes of the need to move beyond accepted meanings, “to grow branches / between worlds on the backs of nurtured equations.” She calls for us to “[s]ay another elsewhere. Open the broom, sick with sorceries.” In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour,” King speaks of a woman traveling the Lexington Avenue Line while “hitting / herself, buck up head heavy against / the number 5 train downtown.” She describes her “self-infliction” as “a cause / that brings us away from our senses.” Here, King references Arthur Rimbaud, who called for poets to transform themselves into “seers” through a “long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”

King’s collection carries out Rimbaud’s call through the velocity of its juxtapositions, racing through shifts in voice, structure, theme, and tone, sometimes within the same poem. In “Understanding the Poem,” “this world is anything but a poem” —and then, in the next line, “This world is this, this world is poem, and I am unusual today, at least.” The frenetic movement of King’s work—from popular culture to high culture, from Georgia pines to New York streets, from all-caps alert to expertly-groomed almost-sonnets—recalls the cry of Baudelaire’s soul to travel “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!” The speed and span of juxtapositions in the collection reveals what is missing from museums: movement, derangement, change.

By this dynamic derangement of our assumptions about culture, King’s museum reveals what culture really is: an ever-changing multiplicity of perspectives that cannot be carved into different, disparate wings. The narrative of culture as a series of singular, separate factions and philosophies leads to the violence of othering and violence against others. In “Perspective,” this moves beyond theory to a matter of actual life and death:

When I see two cops laughing after one of them gets shot because this is TV and one says while putting pressure on the wound, Haha, you’re going to be fine, and the other says, I know, haha!, as the ambulance arrives— I know the men are white.

At the end of the poem, King asks us to wrestle with questions about this narrative, about the curation of our culture, essential for the survival of our nation and ourselves.

Who gets to see and who follows what script? I ask my students. Whose lines are these and by what hand are they written?

In that 2016 New York Times interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova herself echoed this idea: “‘You are always in danger of being shut down,’ she said. ‘But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.’” With her work and words, King shows her readers how to join the fight.

Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books 2013). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her honors include a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. She serves as Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-missing-museum-amy-king/

[webpostingpro-blog]

New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on http://webpostingpro.com/local-blogger-seeks-interview-subjects-for-project-on-interracial-relationships/

Local blogger seeks interview subjects for project on interracial relationships

The latest transplant to Walla Walla, Nathan Brannon is delving into a brand new podcast as host of The Hamster Village, which focuses on interracial relationships.

Nathan said he travels the country interviewing interracial couples and individuals and professionals in fields that intersect with interracial relationships.

He answers questions submitted via listeners at the show, holds activities to foster interracial wellness and has helped with legislative/social projects bearing on the multiracial community, he said in a release

He’s presently trying to find interracial couples and people within the Walla Walla region to be on the show.

Everybody has a story,” he said. “I just want to highlight the one’s tales that talk to racial concord, as opposed to struggle. What better area to appearance than the town I stay in?”

To get in contact, write the show on thehamstervillage.Com’s touch page, or ship a message at the display’s social media pages at Twitter or Facebook.

Nathan and wife Kirsten, who grew up here and attended Walla Walla High Faculty, have a son, Rowan.

Nathan may be acquainted with comedian aficionados as he performed in 2012 at the Melonville Comedy Festival in Hermiston

In 2016, he recorded his 2nd album, “Due to the fact,” with file label Kill Rock Stars.

He won the Seattle Global Comedy competition in 2014, become voted into the Willamette Week’s “Portland’s Funniest five” in his homeland of Portland for 2013, launched his first comedy album, “I Black Out,” in 2013, and changed into topped “Portland’s Funniest Character” in 2012. He has been featured on NPR, Fox, and NBC

How to Build Your Email List by Guest Blogging

Even as websites want site visitors to live on, weblog websites do too. Bloggers are continuously looking for new methods to improve traffic to their websites. Popular strategies include advertising, Seo, syndicating articles, and submitting posts to authoritative websites, consisting of eHow.Com and ezine articles,blogger sign in.blog log in

But some of these take time, cost money, or each.

As a result, increasingly Net entrepreneurs are turning to guest blogging to pressure traffic to their personal web pages. visitor blogging is whilst you write a weblog submit and offer it to any other blogger to submit on their blog. While this arrangement would not price either party any cash, it is able to be hugely beneficial to both.

So why would you need to put in writing on somebody else’s weblog free of charge? And why could a longtime blogger want to post your blog on their website? The solution to that question is straightforward: site visitors.

Construct Your Email List with the aid of visitor blogging

Win/Win for Blogger and guest visitor blogging benefits each the weblog’s host and the individual writing the guest blog. For the visitor, posting on an established blog can cause plenty of hobby from the host’s readers. If the visitor blog provides excessive-value content material, readers can also want click on the links to the guest bloggers internet site, products, and services.

For the host blogger, allowing a visitor blogger to submit on their blog allows them to offer excessive-price content to their readers without having to do anything themselves., They enjoy the same stage of site visitors while not having to analyze and create unique content material.

Creates New One-way links

Running a blog on a bunch blog additionally, allows guest bloggers to achieve new Backlinks to their touchdown pages. Readers who discover the content of the visitor weblog of price can comply with the hyperlinks returned to the guest blogger’s touchdown web page.

These hyperlinks also increase the cost of the touchdown web page within the eyes of the search engines like google – along with Google, Bing, and others. If the host blog site is considered to be an authoritative website with a terrific Alexa rank, Google specifically likes this. This authoritative backlink will increase the guest bloggers page ranking of their touchdown page.

Google wants to provide cost and significance to websites which have a lot of hyperlinks from authoritative websites. They distinguish Those websites as dependable and truthful so that they rank them at or near the pinnacle of the SERP (seek engine consequences web page) for his or her area of interest.

Choosing visitor Bloggers

Established bloggers need to pick out who they permit to write visitor blogs on their pages carefully. They need to ensure the visitor is going to present their readers beneficial and informative content material.

If the host blogger isn’t familiar with the visitor blogger, they can study them, and take a look at with other writers of their community. The host blogger can also ask the guest for credentials consisting of instructional ranges, or past enjoys. They can also ask for hyperlinks to preceding guest blogs.

Normal, the benefits of visitor blogging are several for both the host blogger and the visitor blogger.

Louis Althusser: Hailing, Interpellation, and the Subject of Mass Media

Whilst we stand and pressure, via contrivances of our own, the view of every other closer to our message, our verbal exchange, we are said to be hailing. It’s far to announce that we seek the attention of the opposite, that we are asking, if not annoying, that they pay immediate efforts to understand what It’s far we are saying. For the vital logician, Louis Althusser, the movement of the hair works nicely as a tool of evaluation within the context of verbal exchange research. That is to mention, Althusser’s conceptual framework offers a language via which we can discover and define the have an impact on the mass media exerts over the public.

In Althusser’s wondering, hegemonic ideology plays through and is, in fact, mechanized by, the messages of the mass media. This is to say, if ideologies exist in the very apparatuses and practices of the cultural establishments of the dominant forces (the Kingdom), then in a laissez-faire capitalist society those institutions must encompass the progenitors and disseminators of the messages of mass media. For instance, we increasingly more see the power of the media to form messages of recognition, of the arts, and of conflict. thru the usage of the mass media, people do now not recognise their subjection; as a substitute, they agree with they may be taking part in ritual practices (including balloting in national elections for presidents, or on American Idol for singers) in order to be a person who acts in keeping with their ideas. As opposed to a few kind of static idea set that the dominant proscribes for the subjected to assume and agree with, ideology is a very dynamic manner This is continuously reproducing and reconstituting in actual exercise

Althusser refers to this transformation mechanism as interpellation.

As It is knowledgeable by means of the practice of the mass media, marketing is an excellent vehicle for the translation of the process. For Althusser, interpolation starts of evolved with hailing–a heralding to enroll in at the proposition to hand. For advertising and marketing, this could be the promise of the product as it implies to imbue the patron with unique and socially suitable traits–stunning skin, an envy of others, protection for family, and so forth. Upon those propositions, the hail of the commercial works to recruit topics into its dominant machine. The mass media message calls out, hails, to the viewer and as interest is gathered and solidified, objectifies the viewer through their general reputation of the ideological proposition, and in doing so interpolates them into the ideological machine. Ultimately, successfully interpolated topics do now not understand their subjection, only that they have freely selected to emerge as element and parcel of the dominant ideology.

Stock Images to Boost Your Project

Stock photos are used very broadly in recent times. They’re used by groups or those who increase web sites, bloggers, photo designers, advertising groups, and information organizations, and so on. They can be procured from photo web sites. There are some of the Inventory photograph websites available. A number of them offer pix free of charge while a few are paid web sites.

A Stock photograph internet site is likewise known as a Stock employer. It has photographs captured by way of expert photographers of not unusual locations, landmarks, nature, activities or human beings, and so on.

Inventory images can be procured from companies totally free or via deciding to buy the prison rights for his or her utilization.

The exclusive approaches wherein Stock photographs can be procured through the person are:

Public Area

Whilst an image is to be had in public Domain, it implies that it is able to be used free of price. The person does now not want a license for the use of them. Those images can be used for business and personal functions.

Rights Managed

A rights Controlled photograph is one wherein the way to apply it’s miles specified via the Stock corporation. For instance, the picture size and resolution, geographical region of utilization, the period of time of usage, can be precise. it could be used by a unmarried user or multiple customers.

Royalty Free

There’s a extra flexibility provided While Royalty Loose photos are used. Royalty-Free implies paying a one-time rate for non-special lifelong use of the photograph. You may decide a way to use the image, how typically to apply it, how lengthy to use it, the range of tasks You could use it for, etc. You only need to comply with the license agreement.

But, there are sure restrictions on their usage.

• The snap shots can not be resold or transferred to some other proprietor. • pix need to no longer be utilized in an offensive way. • There will be a restriction on the number of copies used. • These pictures can be utilized by a couple of users.

Extended License: