Hummingbird Acetylene

The turquoise flame of a hummingbird’s head
is a blazing torch of acetylene

burning, as when my father put a welding tip to steel
joining parts of his world with the bluegreen flame
he held between

this hummingbird burns in afternoon light
at the mouth of a flower in god’s machine

jabbing her tip at a perfect hour
joining her flame to mine
in a darting iridescent sheen
.

by Jim Culleny
5/30/14

by Leanne Ogasawara

A city of heavenly gates, Jerusalem is also a city of ill-fated walls.

There are the multiple lives of the glorious city walls, finally re-built by the Sultan of Magnificence in the 16th century; and there is the wailing wall (in my opinion the most beautiful wall on earth) where the Jews go to pray and to remember; and of course there is the new wall, or barrier, built to separate the state from the West Bank. A 26 feet tall concrete monstrosity, it has been attacked by artists and opposed by many international organizations dedicated to conflict resolution, from the Red Cross and the UN to Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches.

When we were in Jerusalem, friends said, “you must visit Bethlehem.” Of course, we wanted to go. To get there from Jerusalem, we boarded Bus #24 from the “Arab Bus Station” outside Damascus Gate. We were told to bring our passports–though this bus drops you within the checkpoint, a bit outside of the town. The ugly Wall dominated the drive into Bethlehem, and I found myself thinking a lot about something I read in book about the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that the Church could in many ways serve as a great model for conflict resolution in the region.

This is very funny, of course, to anyone who knows anything about the contentious history of the church! For the history of the church reads more like comedy or sometimes even melodrama than anything else…. Contributing to the tensions leading up to the Crimean war, down to today all rights of use and maintainance are divided between the main players: the Orthodox, the Armenians, the Roman Catholics and the Copts; with the Ethiopians having been pushed up on to the roof, where they still remain languishing (Chart here). Part of the War's conclusion saw the Status Quo Agreement put into effect whereby not one inch of the church can be changed without the agreement of all parties–and this is why, there has remained a ladder on the roof for well over a hundred years.It takes an awful lot to get all the sides to sit down together to talk, much less to agree to anything!

So bad was it that during the Ottoman times, the keys to the church were entrusted to two prominent Muslim families–whose descendents continue to open and shut the doors of the church each day.

Like always, fact is stranger than fiction. And yet, despite the fact that history has seen the religious groups come to blows again and again over the centuries (with vivid scenes of monks pulling out crucifixes and candletsicks to attack and murder each other right next to the Empty Tomb!); still, being there, I had to admit, I'd take the chaotic and crazy AD-HOC style of conflict resolution and mutual existence to that ugly wall anyday! I kind of saw the writer's point, is what I am saying. Indeed, people said again and again that it is in the Old City, where peoples have lived on top of each other for centuries–bickering nastily, but for the most people in mutual existence–that things were better.

It is, as the saying goes, the walls that divide. Even if it is effective in the short-term, over the long haul, all dialogue ends and relations sour when people are divided. Monologue being a symptom of the colonial imagination, I've never really been a fan of short-term performance/ stop-gap measures…

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by Sarah Firisen

Privacy; Do we have it? If we don’t, should we care? With the news today that the NSA is now collection millions of faces from web images and using face recognition software on them, I think the answer to the first question is clearly, no. But of course, the NSA, at least in this instance, is only making use of digital images of ourselves that we’ve allowed to proliferate on the web. For the all the ballyhoo about government spying, most of us are our own worst enemies. Most people in the Western world, me included, have huge digital footprints. Probably bigger than we even realize. I remember the early days of admitting that I regularly Google myself and the titters as if that was a vaguely dirty thing to do. But honestly, anyone who doesn’t regularly check to see what is out there about them is foolish.

And I don’t just mean Google your name, Google your photos and your phone number. It’s amazing how many people discount those last two. I do a fair amount of online dating these days and I usually do some preliminary searches on men that I’m considering meeting – I honestly consider this a very basic safety precaution. And it’s amazing what I can find in about 20 seconds. People tend to use the same photos for multiple purposes, so the photo that cute guy has used on Match.com is often also the same photo he uses on his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. And what do you know, when I Google that photo and find his Facebook page, I see what a charming couple he and his wife Susan make and how thrilled they are to be celebrating their 10^th wedding anniversary.

People are quick to give their phone numbers away, but many seem not to realize that if they’ve ever posted that number somewhere, on a bulletin board, on EBay, on Twitter, that number is going to link right back to who they are. It never ceases to astound me how easy it is to get some pretty identifying information on people very quickly and easily. It particularly amazes me when these people are clearly trying to cheat on a spouse or are lying about some other aspect of their lives. I cannot tell you how many men contact me online who are using photos of Bollywood actors as their profile photos and passing them off as their own. Yes, Bollywood actors seem to be the fake photos of choice, not sure why. I’m guessing that it’s because they’re usually good looking guys who aren’t well known in the west so men think they’ll get away with the lie. My one exception to this was the “gentleman” of a certain age who used a photo of John Gotti! And if you say that you’re Peter from New York who works in sales and I Google your photo and find it on the online bio of a neurology researcher who lives in California, I’m probably going to get suspicious and decline that friendly glass of wine you’ve offered.

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by Eric Byrd

Have you ever seen Sherman? It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man – the hauteur, noble, yet democratic: a hauteur I have always hoped I, too, might possess. (Whitman)

Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman are the conspicuous figures in the revolutionary re-founding of the United States. The victory of which they were the grand strategists and the most acclaimed media actors seemed to decide some of the fundamental questions the Founders had left to ambiguous laws and a faith in future compromise; a victory that eased, though it did not resolve, the existentially divisive “Negro Question” James Madison noted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. [Difference] did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.”

In his essential orations – the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address – Lincoln is a civic priest or poet, rhetorical guardian, keeper of ideals whose phrasemaking points to a transcendental order. He promised Americans that though their republic had collapsed in an orgy of violence, their ideals were imperishable, and waited be reborn from the bloody struggle. Grant, ancestor of all our taciturn gunslingers and laconic detectives, is the heroic everyman, the homely knight, the General-in-Chief who wore a private’s blouse in the field and appeared apolitical, ambitious of nothing beyond speedy victory, and so able to allay Americans’ traditional republican fear that a powerful general is a potential dictator.

Sherman is the scourge, the eccentric terror. The harsh style of his widely reprinted reports and official letters provided the public with a “vocabulary of the drastic,” wrote Charles Royster, and ensured that to many Unionists “his public character embodied the severity needed for the crushing of the rebellion.” He embodies that severity still, reduced to a now nearly anonymous aphorism (“War is Hell”), to the cinematic image of Atlanta in flames, and to the famous Matthew Brady portrait that made Evan S. Connell think of a “vulture with scrofula.” Of course Sherman, like Lincoln and Grant, is far more than his image, and a deeper study of the man is essential for the student of America’s consolidation and expansion. Sherman is one member of the late nineteenth century power elite who will tell you how the sausages were made, and in prose of nervous vehemence, half despairing, half gloating, with that note of philosophic detachment that creeps into discussions of the inevitable. He could also wax lyrical; the Mississippi River was to him a national Tree of Life, and he reminded a New Orleans correspondent that the city was

the root of a tree whose branches reach the beautiful fields of western New York, and the majestic cañons of the Yellowstone, and that with every draught of water you take the outflow of the pure lakes of Minnesota and the dripping dews of of the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains.

He was subject to bouts of depression and reread Shakespeare constantly; he ends his memoirs with lines from Jaques’ melancholic soliloquy. He was prominent in the ruin of the rebellious slaveholders and the destruction of the nomadic tribes that hunted on the Great Plains; and for someone perched on the usually euphemistic heights of American power, he was villainously candid about the requisite violence and terror, and he was full of personal paradoxes.

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by Bill Benzon

Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time photographing graffiti in Jersey City, which is on the West bank of the Hudson River across from lower Manhattan. Most of that time I’ve photographed a handful of sites, over and over again, week after week, month after month. What I’ve seen is that things change. Of course the graffiti is eroded by the weather; in some cases it may also be “buffed” (eradicated) by the authorities. More likely, though, is that it will become over-written by other graffiti writers – that’s what they call themselves, by the way, writers, for their art is grounded in letters.

Even this piece, which looks like a green triceratops, is a name: “Joe”, shortened from “Japan Joe”, the nom de guerre of the writer:

It’s large; about 18 feet wide and seven feet high. Here you see a train going by:

Think of Japan Joe in that spot, working for several hours, surrounded by greenery, but also the large freight trains rumbling by. The trains and the greenery travel into his mind where they fuse into the image of a large green animal, the triceratops.

That’s the spirit of the place.

And, in time, Japan Joe’s triceratops had been degraded by the weather to the point that Kemos and Jnub could go over it without insulting Joe:

Life goes on.

Thus I have come to understand the graffiti site as more than a physical place. It IS that, but the physical place is to be understood, perhaps, provisionally, as a resource accessed by the graffiti, and thus by the graffiti writer. The site is a confluence of physical, social, and aesthetic energy.

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by Matt McKenna

Much has been made of whether this summer's Godzilla movie is a pro-environmentalist film or an anti-environmentalist film. While both readings are plausible on a surface level, neither addresses the dominant public policy critique embedded within the biggest monster flick since last year's Pacific Rim. While the lack of an environmental focus in Godzilla will surely rankle those who watch the film in the hopes of affirming their respective worldviews (whatever those may be), less politically motivated moviegoers will be pleased to discover that the film grapples with the more interesting problem of establishing a culture of open, data-driven public policy.

Godzilla begins by showing glimpses of the monster within the jittering frames of 1950s archival footage. We soon learn that those atomic bomb tests performed during the Cold War weren't tests at all–they were attempts to kill a mysterious giant creature known as Godzilla. Flash forward to 1999 when Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) notices strange seismic activity while working at a nuclear power plant in Japan. When the seismic activity increases and the power plant collapses, a multinational governmental organization called Monarch quarantines the area and establishes a cover story about the plant being destroyed by an earthquake. Brody, skeptical of the official report, secretly researches the disaster and finds evidence for an enormous spider-like monster lurking about. Flash-forward once more to the present day where Brody finally has the opportunity to present his research to Monarch only to be interrupted a giant spider monster hatching from its giant spider monster egg. This creature subsequently spends its screen time and the film's budget destroying various American cities in search of the nuclear energy it needs to sustain its rampage. Conveniently for humans, however, Godzilla wakes up, rises from the depths of the ocean, and hunts the enormous spider for what appears to be sport.

With a plot like that, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Godzilla has aligned itself with environmentalists–mess with the environment and giant spiders will exterminate your species, it seems to say. At the same time, this message is undercut by the fact that a deus ex machina in the form of Godzilla appears and saves the day with no act of contrition required by humans. Why is Godzilla's environment-related message so muddled? Because there isn't one. When the first half of the film is taken into account, it becomes clear that Godzilla's primary message is actually a plea for policy makers to be less reactionary and more data-oriented.

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