“The key seperating characteristic of Adults and Children is simple, Fear of Breaking Shit. Children do not have this crippling learning disability, they do not Fear to Break Shit. Adults do. So Adults will not try anything that they aren’t sure will not Break Shit. Since an Adult who has never used a computer does not know what will Break Shit and what won’t, they prefer to do nothing with the computer. A child doesn’t care whether what he does to the computer Breaks Shit or not, he just wants to know what it will do. So every time a child does something and it doesn’t Break Shit, he or she adds that act to the list of actions that Don’t Break Shit and moves on. The same if the action Does Break Shit. Hopefully the child will try to fix it after he Breaks Shit, and thereby learn how to UnBreak Shit.”
The Aérotrain,a French working concept for a high-speed hovercraft train. It never went past the experimental stage.
Author unknown.
If you haven’t seen the stunning 2001 documentary “War Photographer” about prize-winning conflict photojournalist James Nachtwey, you really must. It’s a beautifully filmed, deeply contemplative study of what it means to be a photographer, and what it means to be a witness to conflict.
It also features an absolutely enthralling cinematic technique: a tiny camera mounted above Nachtwey’s own shutter button, so you can see the stream of time and context around each of his decisions to capture (or not capture.) You can see it in the trailer above, at the 1:17 mark.
And this brings me back to my recent essay, On the Constant Moment. If the Decisive Moment is Nachtwey’s shutter button there with the protestors on the West Bank in 2001, the Constant Moment is your ability to choose different moments from the video feed, from wherever you are, in 2013.
Freed from instant decision in the middle of chaos, able to pause and rewind, did you make different aesthetic choices about when to “shoot?” Would Nachtwey, if he could?
That’s the Constant Moment.
“Unfortunately not all teachers are thinkers. Some are just large fleshy MP3 players.”
Tim Roth, age 21.
Ghetto delivery service.
Founder George Lincoln Rockwell and members of the American Nazi Party attend a Nation of Islam summit in 1962 to hear Malcolm X speak.
Photo by Eve Arnold.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
