twistedlamb: LA fashion week: SkinGraft SS11
Read moreAuthor: m1k3y
The Taliban, once a local militia, took over Afghanistan in the 1990s, perhaps partly because of the mobility that smuggled Toyota trucks brought them. According to The New York Times, Taliban officials subsequently used the vehicles to patrol the streets, enforcing their strict interpretation of Islamic law. (via Pickup Trucks From Warzones Across the Globe – Newsweek)
Read moreRead moreIn the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
The collective’s latest installment, tackled such conversationally skittish topics as “the late arrival of the goth culture to Kuwait in the early 2000’s… as well as the haunting destruction left behind after the invasion in 1990-91.” A series of ghost-like, moth-dusted images, captured by Fatima Al Qadiri, inside one of the county’s many deserted buildings were a solemn gaze into a mirror of self denial and procrastination. A compilation of photo and paint on canvas images by Monira Al Qadiri which depicted an androgynous male wearing a black hood and dramatic makeup spoke of habits rarely discussed over a light lunch. (via bazaar magazine – Kuwait)
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Any suggestion of a central “super database” has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time. That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages (via Every email and website to be stored – Telegraph)
Read moreRead moreIt’s no accident that Spook Country references Wired almost immediately as Wired, as a lifestyle magazine, is specifically tailored not to the people who live the lifestyle depicted in Spook country (there aren’t enough of them to support a magazine, even one as full of adverts as Wired) but rather the people who wish they lived that lifestyle. Wired’s pages are full of adverts for high-end technology that you “need” from TVs to games consoles to business hotels with free WiFi and films on demand. Spook Country’s world is as aspitational as that of Wired.
Read moreOur historical vision has been reduced to barely an arm’s length. We are so utterly wedded to free-market capitalism and the politics of identity through consumerism that when we want to express displeasure at the way society has turned out we are out of ammunition and reduced to slinging insults. When elections come around we have no interest in parties that would change the nature of our society and so we vote for the one who seems nicest or whose tastes and opinions on small issues most closely watch ours
Read moreThe tastes and habits of the world’s bohemias are real symbols of a certain way of life and way of thinking; there’s fidelity to a certain truth in the underlying reality, and that is how a Tokyo hipster can quickly recognize what might prove to be a kindred spirit in Buenos Aires or Austin. This kind of symbolism has been around since at least the time of Oscar Wilde, when the greenery-yallery aesthetes drifted about carrying “a poppy or a lily” (q.v. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.) In the age of the Internet, though, that symbolic force has become just hugely magnified, because new symbols can penetrate the hive mind so quickly, and so deeply.
So today’s bohemians get in a big gang and live together, as they have for over a century at least; almost every city of any size in the Western world has at least one such neighborhood, and the big cities have many, each with its own flavor. In effect, though, all these places are the same place, like Solzhenitsyn’s “archipelago” (except not a prison camp for political dissidents): a series of far-flung islands but really one place, invisibly linked. In this case, residents of the archipelago value inventiveness, intelligence and taste over wealth and conformity; what Lethem is calling “connoisseurship.” There is lots of artw
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 