One Reporter Is Killed, Everyone Is in Danger

BBC footage making the rounds in Japan shows that Japanese APF photographer Kenji Nagai, killed yesterday in the Burma protests, was actually shot at close range and murdered.

This amazing piece of film will hopefully draw enough international outrage that the junta will be shamed, perhaps ousted.

Similar events helped bring down the Nicaraguan Somoza regime in 1979. When ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart was shot to death in Managua by a national guardsman, American reporters captured the killing on tape. The footage was aired across the world, leading to the end of American support of the regime.

Easily Identified by Children

Fallout shelters.
I remember the one in my elementary school. The hallway walls were painted bad shades of dirty, muted green. Weird, unhealthy blue. Near a caged-off stairwell was a sign: “Fallout Shelter” with that telltale danger graphic symbol.

I found this information about it here:

The following description is taken from a draft version of a fact sheet entitled "National Fallout Shelter Sign."

"In awarding the contract for design of the sign to graphic arts studios it was designated that the services of a psychologist be obtained to recommend a visual symbol that could be easily identified and remembered. The sign had to meet the psychological requirements of simplicity, easy identification, retention and arresting color combination."

"It had to be simple enough to be easily identified by children, non-English speaking persons or others who may not be able to read. The color combination, yellow and black, is considered as the most easily identified attention getter by psychologists in the graphic arts industry. The sign can be seen and recognized at distances up to 200 feet."

"The shelter symbol on the sign is a black circle set against a yellow rectangular background. Inside the circle, three yellow triangles are arranged in geometric pattern with the apex of the triangles pointing down."

"Below the fallout symbol, lettered in yellow against black, are the words Fallout Shelter in plain block letters. Yellow directional arrows are located directly underneath the lettering which will indicate the location of the shelter."

I saw one of these signs yesterday, outside my gym, a YMCA built in 1925. I found myself nostalgic and surprised. I felt about 7 years old again, remembering the potential of nuclear demise as we came off the Cold War.


And then I got on an elliptical trainer.

Writing for the New Millennium

I watched a small Latino boy play with a large black plastic horse on the train this morning. The horse was oversized, bigger than the boy’s head, and stiff—no moveable parts. The kid sat in his stroller, put the horse on the ground and made it go: “bad-ump, bad-ump, bad-ump,” just like we did in my childhood, before toys involved moving only your thumbs.

Everything these days gets poured into a song I am writing. Like milk. This is my first attempt at a song. It is, perhaps, becoming overcrowded.

Witness:

I read about a phrase of Poe’s: “The imp of the perverse.” Song.

And now a description of Michel Fournier, a man attempting the highest atmospheric skydive ever (25 miles up)—a height from which your blood boils and pours from your orifices. Burkhard Bilger, the author of this New Yorker piece, gave this fantastic description of Fournier: “As he talks, he hunches his shoulders, flutters his hands, blows out his cheeks, and bobs his head—the full arsenal of Gallic mannerisms. One moment he’ll cry out in high delight—Hoo-hoo!—eyebrows peaked like accents circonflexes. Then, suddenly, his lips clamp shut and his eyes glint, like a toad that has swallowed a dragonfly.”

Marvelous.
(Song.)

“Text sex.”
Song.

I will know today if I will have a niece or a nephew. There hasn’t been a boy in my family in forever…points to boy.

Song?
Baby.

“Baby, baby, baby…baby, baby, baby…” Most overused word in a song?

Going to stick with “imp.” Less common. “Imp, imp, imp…imp, imp, imp…”

Further Investigation Required, Sleep, Also

So among the bildungsromans written about the gentrification of New York, I read an actually interesting article giving some of the history of the East Village in the New York Times today.

Here’s the weirdest part:

“We began in Tompkins Square Park, a focal point in the neighborhood’s history, which before the 1800s was soupy swampland and marshes. The East River shoreline was where Avenue C is now; everything east of that was built on progressive stages of landfill — including, amazingly, rubble from bombed London, shipped across the Atlantic after World War II to form part of the foundation for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.”

Rubble from bombed London? What?

From My Bedroom, A Long Time On

The Things We Keep in Our Houses

“I have to check my glass eyeballs,” the Welder said to me last night.

Of course you do.

Because you are making a 14-foot-long giant squid out of steel and you need to consult your case of glass eyes to figure out how you will paint the squid’s.

Obviously.

This is a case of glass eyes. Left ones. Some are cloudy in order to match a cloudy right eye.

This is the bottom of the case. It was made in Cincinnati for an eye doctor.

This is the glass he will use to make the eyes.

Eyeballs.

A Scotlandishly Glaswegian Four Days in 15 Pictures

I have been to Scotland and back. I am so twisted around by clocks, speeding vehicles and the particles of my own brain matter I cannot write. So here are some pretty pictures. I took about 300 with my new camera, but I’ll spare you. Unless you really want to see them. In that case, you know where to find me. I’ll just say I have many, many photos of men in kilts. And I’m totally fucking serious.