photojournalism

i created a photojournalism page for an application. go and look at the cities where i've shot.

Good bye NJ license plate, hello Empire State

Life's especially depressing now and filled with applications (the blog entry below was one of the application exercises), thesis, and GREs. Extended my visa, waiting approval, and therefore stranded in country till requisite paperwork (and job, oh god) reaches me. I'm going to stay positive. I need to stop getting depressed on weekends, and stop being bitter on the phone at 2am (case for the last 3 nights). I'm in Queens now, escaping from whorish monsters and sexy goths, and seeing the people that matter. A lot of books are with me. But it feels good, this marvelous change of scene. This wonderful borough called Queens. Kia is costing me so much money, and making me make all these momentous decisions. I never became an adult until I owned a car. And suddenly persuant to last week, when I got pulled over to be notified my everything was expired, we're now co-owners cos Geico thinks I am a lousy driver, and doesn't want to grant me insurance... I guess there's no better time for makeovers than Halloween. Chucked my old (stupid looking) New Jersey license plates this week. Hello Empire State. My car is all beat up, and plastered all over with autumn leaves. Poor Kia, with replaced tires and chipped paints. And now, these beautiful sparkling New York plates--ridiculously (this was assigned to me) emblazoned with the numbers 0 and 7. And it starts with EUX (yes to be pronounced in the French way, with the glorious pout, like eux la la. Altogether now: EUX.) Almost like my first pair of heels, but better.

Obamarijuana: Smoke Signals?

During the months of Obamamania following the inauguration, this awesome photograph of Barack Obama smoking a rolled cigarette with droopy eyes went viral on the Internet. That image spurred delight amongst Obama fans—and lots of passionate debate over the question, was Obama actually smoking a weed joint?

No one is entirely sure. “I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively,” Obama once said. Is it?

Since Justice Department announced that federal drug agents would not longer be prosecuting people who are legally using, selling or supplying medical marijuana in the states that permit its use, pundits have been divided over the legal implications of this statement.

Graham Boyd, director of the Drug Law Reform Project was quoted on The New York Times for saying that this memo signaled the Obama administration’s willingness to embrace more liberal marijuana laws. Marijuana advocates see this as an encouraging shift that rides on the recent appointment of Richard Gil Kerlikowske as Obama’s top drug policy adviser, perceived to stand for the broader decriminalization of marijuana.

Perhaps the great thing about this memo—as with that iconic 1980s photograph of Obama smoking lovely—that it could be interpreted to be as controversial or uncontroversial as one would want it to be. Thus lies the ingenuity of this carefully calibrated statement. Smoke signals, anyone?

• New guidelines might be effective in states that are currently considering medical marijuana laws. Slate writer Christopher Beam writes, “Many states take their cues from the federal government when it comes to drug policy. States could take the new policy as a tacit nod from Uncle Sam to go ahead and allow medical marijuana back home.” On the other hand, Beam notes that in states like California, where there is an established system of medical marijuana legislation, “the new policy is unremarkably uncontroversial… If you run a medical marijuana business in Los Angeles that the state deems illegal, the federal government can't help you. In fact, it can still raid your facility.” The status quo, for the most part, remains unchanged.

• The Memo muddies the federal role. Tom Riley, the associate director of the White House Office of National Drug Control from 2001 to 2009 has blogged that “the memo itself is internally conflicted to the point of incoherence. While ostensibly encouraging prosecutors to defer to state and local laws on marijuana, it also recognizes that federal “interest” can still allow the feds, at their discretion, to step in and prosecute.” In other words, this memo sets the stage for a complicated clash between federal and local governments. Riley makes this compelling argument: by giving the green light to medical marijuana, the Obama administration might cause the proliferation of traffickers exploiting the medical label. With that, the hope that more liberal laws will be rolled out would just end up as a pipe dream.

The grey lady talks immigration (barf)

So the Dallas correspondents in the NY Times wrote this article with the lead:

Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and despite repeated mandates from Congress, the United States still has no reliable system for verifying that foreign visitors have left the country.

So both democrats and republican senators are rallying for more bureaucratic procedures to monitor the exiting of immigrants. Extra paper work to target a minority of a minority. We understand: overloaded elephant of an immigrant bureaucracy forces the unwelcome to slip in under the radar the same way black market goods do. So how do we combat the problem? MORE BUREACRACY, YEAH!

Like all romantic narratives, the article has only one protagonist. The only immigrant highlighted is a Mr Smati, who (of course) is also an Islamic fundamentalist. OK. Where's the other point of view? Why are readers not allowed to comment on this story? The narrative-driven stories of the Times are particularly arresting and manipulative. With their rambling house style and nut graphs all the way at the bottom of the story, how can we not be dazzled? We're all just waiting for the bomb to drop. (Pun intended.)

The best thing is that the bomb does drop, with this explosive closing paragraph:

When the F.B.I. later searched his residence, they found a Beretta 9 millimeter pistol and a box of ammunition, along with his passport and the expired visa, the court documents show.

Ithaca

Today, I went for Ithaca's Apple harvest fest--it's a country fair where farmers come out to sell apple cider, apples, apple pie. Very rural, very small town. Exoticized oriental food alongside hot dogs. Cotton candy, funnel cakes, kettle corn and granny apples. Junky earrings, carnival rides, mediocre paintings by hobbyists.

It's getting colder, the sort of cold that makes you restive. I met a wine vineyard manager this weekend. Maybe I could help with the harvest one weekend. The town I live in, Ithaca, was named after Greek mythology. It is bordered by the town of Ulysses. The college town does have a lot of Greek life, I guess that's what warrants its name.

According to Dante, after Ulysses had returned home to Ithaca and had settled down to rule his island kingdom, he became restless and desired to set out on another voyage of exploration to the west. In old age, he persuaded a band of his followers to accompany him on such a voyage. "Consider your origin," he addressed them, "ye were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge." I think, he was saying, Ithaca was way too cold.

Remaining dishes

In the Times food critic Frank Bruni's final column, he listed steps on how to navigate a menu:

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

This is my last blog for the summer. So much life has been going on. Merce Cunningham memorial concert, District 9, Terminator, Star Track, Moon , lots of indie free concerts, a publishing job offer (am really bitter I have to go back to school, and as a result, lost the offer), library books at the New York Public Library, teaching justin how to bike at Central Park, beautiful Astoria, shitty neighbors, Montreal, free Norton books, a little thesis writing (not quite enough...) Good friends, good company. New York is where the heart is; Upstate is an overripe banana, long after its sell-by date. I also just found out that the university press can't take any more students as part-timers, and so I've effectively been fired. Hopefully there will be many remaining dishes.

Bright Lights, Big Internet

From Bill Wasik's sparkling piece about celebrities in a time of the Internet:

And so the move online changes how we make art, but the road ahead there is uncharted and perilous. In the old model, young creatives dreamed of entertaining the millions, but in practice they could do so only by first pleasing a small group of gatekeepers: established figures who controlled access to the audience and, in doing so, protected young people from that audience, its obsessions and desertions, its adoration and its scorn. These old hands had to worry about the numbers, of course, but they rationalized the upticks and downticks through a certain set of professional values, which they themselves spent years imbibing and which they in turn pressed upon their wards.

Online, though, the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated — if you can figure out how to find it and, what’s harder, to keep it. What to you is a big break is, to this increasingly sophisticated and fickle audience, just one forwarded e-mail message in a teeming inbox, to be refilled again tomorrow with a whole new slate of distractions. “Microcelebrity” is now the rule, with respect not only to the size of one’s fan base but also to the duration of its love. Believe it or not, the Internet is a tougher town than New York; fewer people make it here, but no one there seems to make it for long.