http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G5tdqojA26E

“”Until recently (…), television news tended to reinforce traditional narrative values. Like the newsreels once shown in movie theaters, broadcast news compiled and contextualized footage from the field. By the early 1960s, the three main networks – CBS, NBC, and ABC – each had its own fifteen- to thirty-minute news program every weekday evening, each anchored by a reassuring middle-aged man. These broadcasts enjoyed such authority that Walter Cronkite could end his broadcast, nonironically, by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” The daily news cycle gave everyone, from editors to politicians, the opportunity to spin and contextualize news into stories. This is what journalism schools taught: how to shape otherwise meaningless news into narratives.

(…)

Later, coverage of the Vietnam War threatened this arrangement, as daily footage of American soldiers enduring and even perpetuating war atrocities proved too much for the evening news to contextualize. There was still a story being told, but the story was out of the government’s – or the propagandists’ – control. (…)

This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue. Like any adolescent, we felt ready to go out and see the world for ourselves.

[Rushkoff goes into a brief case study of CNN here.]

[Such] saturation with live, uncensored, and unconsidered images from around the world impacted public opinion profoundly and actually forced government leaders to make decisions more quickly. Officials at the Pentagon eventually dubbed this phenomenon “the CNN effect”, as then Secretary of State James Baker explained, “The one thing it does, is to drive policy makers to have a policy position. (…) Policy, as such, is no longer measured against a larger plan or narrative; it is simply a response to changing circumstances on the ground, or on the tube.

As a result, what used to be called statecraft devolves into a constant struggle with crisis management. Leaders cannot get on top of issues, much less ahead of them, as they seek merely to respond to chaos in a way that makes them look authoritative. (…)

George W Bush posed his control over narrativity just three days after 9/11 when he stood at Washington National Cathedral and told America, “a This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at our manner of our choosing.” He later landed on an aircraft carrier and stood in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, as if to punctuate the conclusion of this story, but reality would not submit. In a presentist world, it is impossible to get in front of the story, much less craft it from above.”

– Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff

Really the perfect backdrop for this essay by Ruth Behar. It describes how the idea of home how, with 21st century travel and expansion of “non-places” (subways, airports, the “everything in between, the vast infrastructure of modern life”), the idea of home has been tested and loosened, into its truer meaning of “connection to others”. // http://aeon.co/magazine/society/where-is-home-for-the-child-of-nomads/

As ‘non-places’ expand from centres to peripheries all around the world, there is renewed pressure to work hard to prevent the home from becoming a long-term hotel room. Sentimental notions of the sanctity of the home are enlisted as a means of challenging the threat of ‘non-places.’ A preponderance of guides, including websites such as Apartment Therapy and Houzz, exist for the sole purpose of assisting us in making our homes uniquely charming and irreplaceable. Home Depot and Pier One have become the iconic commercial outlets offering practical supplies and decorative touches for these homemaking projects that alternately encourage us to be richly rococo or humbly Zen.

But there is another choice we can make, and that is to give up home altogether and be homeless by choice – not as a result of poverty or broken family ties, but to let go of the weight of the things that prevent us from fully engaging with the world and becoming true cosmopolitans, people at home everywhere.

Norway means to me Roald Dahl and the northern lights. The legend that is Dahl the writer of children’s play and dreams had parents who were from Oslo. And there was where he’d written his autobiographical book, Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), which i’d devoured as a girl.

Everybody knows the fabled northern lights, even if they’ve never seen it. Somehow the mind knows to conjure magic from the lights we’ve already collected over our lifetimes, whether through experience or through the photographs captured by others.

To me, comfortably sweating a little in the tropics now, it also means a chill–if you’ve ever taken in a breath of ice, so sharp that your body splits, ceases to exist in that instant. Studies of those who freeze to death share the basic adage: cold is an absence. Of heat, movement, time. Taking in a shard of cold, a flash of divine light, you are no longer in your warm cocoon, no longer separated in yourself from vast eternity; in that moment, there a perfect snapshot of your ephemeral dream hangs.

Ole C. Salomonsen took this one. Apparently, from September to April are the when the northern lights occur, when change of seasons charges and solar wind stir a geomagnetic storm, the aurora borealis. I’m not sure if i’ll get to take in those, but in my time there, i hope to see how living is under such skies.

In his ‘Infra’ series, Richard Mosse uses an extinct type of infrared film, originally used by military. It registers the invisible type of light which we don’t see with the human eye——

“”Beauty is the sharpest tool in the box. If you’re trying to make people feel something, and you’re able to make it beautiful, they’d sit up and listen.

Often something that’s derived from human suffering or from war–if you’re able to make it beautiful–it’s a great ethical problem in the viewer’s mind, so then they’re confused, angry, and disoriented. And that is great because you got to get them to actually think about perception and how that image was produced and consumed.

And with this Congolese film, i’m not even doing it through beauty, i’m just doing through colour! People are so offended by the colour pink, cos it’s a feminine colour!

Honestly, how much more constructed is a pink photograph than a black+white photograph? …In that respect, it’s about using the faculty of the sublime, to make visible what’s beyond the limits of language, and to bring that to the ethical problem of bearing witness that is in documentary.”

I confess. It was all jangles and chorus for me when i heard this ballad from the Dum Dum Girls a couple of years ago. And of course, Dee Dee’s voice. The video shows her telling her despair as random folks put scissors through her outfit.

Wait.

She’s letting her. She’s letting her cutting her up. Or not. Now a guy. They’re really getting into her. I couldn’t get over it: her reactions, their actions, her composures , their didactions. This time, i’m hooked. I imagine Dee Dee driving those slow lines in a concerted compassion. You abuse the ones who love you; You abuse the ones who won’t. If you ever had a real heart; I don’t think you’d know where to start.

What can i say. Different contexts, different meanings.

The video apparently follows Yoko Ono’s art performance, Cut Piece. It had one simple but destructive verb as its instruction: “Cut.” First performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, legend goes one man held up the scissors in a mock attack–Yoko was less afraid than disappointed. Here’s the video showing the performance the following year at Carnegie Hall.

Yoko On enacted Cut Piece as an expression of her hope for world peace. In 2003, post 9/11, “a time where we need to trust each other”, she performed it for the last time, this time in front of mass media.

The work is interactive; what’s created is what the audience make of it. And since this is a song about relationships, i think of, too, of the evolving form and shape our relationships take via papercuts and dagger rips outside of an few-minute clip. Let’s take a swill with this quote:

Art is inexorably bound up in the situation where it is produced and where it is experienced. You can emphasize this, or you can emphasize where it is produced or experienced: you can even equate them, and emphasize the equation. The relationship exists in any case, and, either as artist or as audience, we are in a situation analogous to a swimmer who may fight the surf, dive through it and struggle against it until he gets out beyond where the surf is noticeable: or else this swimmer can roll with the waves.

Dick Higgins, Postface (1964)

In art and in love, between parties there’s assumed trust (has to be), unpredictability, and sometimes slow, slow violation (tempting). Both produce a third entity. In love’s more organic dance, however, boundaries are inevitably tested and broken, but just as quickly though, is the opportunity to heal what you’ve encroached upon. The invasive hand also illuminating love.

When that hand is love’s lost, breakdowns occur because, i mean, watch the video. And initial love’s high dissipates.

I close my eyes to conjure up something
But it’s just a faint taste in my mouth

By tomorrow I’ll be leaving
By tomorrow I’ll be gone
If you want to tell me something
You had better make it strong

‘Cause I think I’m coming down
I think I’m coming down

.

Arrived as dusk fell and Siena was breaking into its final fervour. Everything was brick, stone and quiet. After Florence I was eager to get to know its proud rival.

The Siena rapido bus from Florence (just 1h, 7euros) ends at Piazza Gramsci, just a km uproad from the historic centre. We walked in.

Someone noted Siena’s “herringbone bricks worn smooth with centuries of ‘passeggiata”. I didn’t know its age-old pedestrianism (yet) but trying to catch the fading light had me eyeing the sweeps of medieval wall. People walked leisurely, following dusk’s rhythm, their coats blacks and browns blending into the old walls. I knew they’d be even more gorgeous in the daylight by the hour.

By the time I arrived at the campo, I was quite infatuated. 6:40pm, stars out, people seated on the downcurve encircling the Palazzo Publico and its Torre Del Mangia.

The entire week i was in lausanne, the winter weather was gorgeous, crisp. Days alternated between blues and clean greys.

I was also woefully sick, down with a bug the moment i landed.

Every day, i walked the street lining the port from Ouchy metro to my class, a lil weak and drunk on a bad cold, but praising the sky, the sea, the wind, the mountain ranges in the distance–everything that made up the horizon between sky and land, town to sea. I remember wednesday was so clear, i walked backwards to admire the sunrise. Not really, but you get me.

The air feels amazing, a sharp thrill through your nose and your skin tingles under the warmth. You just want to drink in the whole expanse in your lungs. This was 20 – 24 January 2014.

First on the radio, came this line over and over:

Say something, I’m giving up on you
I’ll be the one, if you want me to
Anywhere, I would’ve followed you
Say something, I’m giving up on you

A quick google revealed “A Great Big World”, an American two-member band (shazam doesn’t work on the dying seconds of a song). I’ve heard them, in the way you hear many contemporary indie bands; their sounds interesting, image taking a while to filter through, if any, because, you know, their sound’s interesting. Axel and vaccarino apparently met as nyu music biz students, and they look it in the video. Preppy threads and hair.

The video showed this lady. “Is that–that can’t be *listens out for power vowel yodels*–it does sound like christina aguilera…but with an indie band?”

What’s that story?

I dig up another video, and another, to hear them live. Each time i thought, surely xtina will let loose now! But no, the same incredible simplicity, piano, strings, steady, and wave after wave of emotion. Listen to the words, they’re only a few. The ballad holds up the chasm between people at a very precise moment. This bit is important, the song recollects the moment between secure love and love over, often neglected and so vulnerable in the deal of relationships, but a game-changer.

And watch christina give life to it. Two worlds: indie band and mega pop star , playing out this humble acknowledgement of a love done wrong through no fault. No fault at all.

I’m going to quote Bradley Stern from MuuMuse here, because i concur: she “doesn’t even have her own verse or chorus – she resigns to delivering subtle, yet effective, backing vocals for the entirety of the re-recording. It’s only in the song’s final few moments that she allows that powerhouse pipes to blow in the background. And those whispers at the very end? ‘Say something, I’m giving up on you…’ Gulp.”

What a collaboration.

She said of it, “So simple, and it’s so quiet and still and steady, in a way
pleading to hear something, to hear some kind of answer, or to get an answer,
in the most humble, unassuming, non-demanding way.”

.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you
And anywhere, I would have followed you

So many times we’re simply hanging on the other person to say something.

The rain’s come earlier, i’m thinking. “I’m amazed there’s just so much water”, colleague comments. Tropical downpours are common, regular, but still pretty awesome. “Ponding”–once dramatically pronounced a “‘once in 50 years'” event–is regular occurrence. It’s either hibernate at home, hearing the winds lash the walls, or slosh to work and be damp but grateful. Outdoors are wet rats and muddied squares of grass. Nobody wants to be outdoors.

Outdoors.

I read about the Allemansrätt that is usual in most Scandinavian countries.

The main rule is that one can walk, ski or cycle everywhere as long as nothing is harmed and nobody disturbed.

You may pass on foot through forests and across farms but not fields and not military areas. You may not pass fences unless there is a gate that is not locked. In forests you may pick flowers (except some protected species and locations), berries, mushrooms and fallen branches. You may not pass gardens, at least not where the house can be seen or when there is a fence (even if it is open). You may not interfere with any economic activity exercised by the owner of the land. You may stay one night in a tent in an inconspicuous place (not garden) if you don’t leave a single trace. You may not use houses, jetties, sheds etc.

You may not, you may absolutely not, make up fire directly on cliffs or move rocks around, specifically not the rocks that have been placed there by an ancient culture, nor hunt, nor steal eggs. These four latter activities seem to be favourites of our good friends the Germans. The main rule is that one can walk, ski or cycle everywhere as long as nothing is harmed and nobody disturbed. Then, there are refinements and exceptions to this, of course.

How close to houses can one dare to come? No definite rule exists, but in Sweden it’s often said that the privacy area around a dwelling is to be understood as at least 200 meters (in Norway 150 meters). This does of course depend on the landscape and other conditions. An alternative wording of the rule is that if you hear or see other people, then you are too close to them.
– Fredrik Östman

“Everyman’s right”: implicit is the freedom to roam. This right of public access goes down to “private” lands. You can walk, hike, camp wherever you please within responsible reason. That suggests public freedom, and crucially, a blessing of open spaces. I love that. We have some space here; there’s a bigger (relatively) square of grass i pass daily en route to the MRT. Huge trees, verdant grass, always shade with golden warmth streaming through. The neighbourhood’s many dogs and dog owners would love a stroll there. The neighbourhood’s many old would probably enjoy a sit out in the fresh air. I would. Instead, a stake “State Land” claims it and a green fence surrounds it.

Once in a while, you catch a stray dog wandering through that square, and you think wild thing, out there like that in the open, it’s gonna get caught and put down.

I don’t have a picture of the square or its restrictive sign. But i have a picture, a kind of mirage, of open green lands no one can tell me it’s not mine to through.