Enthusiasms

Week 18

Thought experiment: imagine a world in which the inverse of the 9/11 conspiracy theories is true. A world in which the planes fly into the twin towers and they come crashing down, like they did, but the US government by some combination of extreme luck and cunning deceives everyone, pretending it wasn’t a terrorist attack, but an unfortunate accident. Everyone buys this explanation, for some stupid reason having to do with [insert artistic license].

Does the West allow itself to be terrorized? Do the terrorists win? They were not, after all, out to blow up buildings, they were out to cast fear into our hearts, and they succeeded. What I’m interested in, here, is the degree to which the paranoia, the infringements on civil rights, the security parade, the fear, how much of all that was created by politicians and how much was due to the population at large. Can we blame not acts of terrorism, per conspiracy theorists, but terrorized responses, us actually being terrified and so fulfilling the goals of terrorism, on politicians? Or are we all complicit? There is no doubt that 9/11 created a political climate that allowed us to be terrified and so compromise on many of the values we (where “we” is the Western world, not just the US) value. But did politicians merely play by the rules of the game they were forced by circumstance to play, or were they actually responsible for creating the game in the first place?

Imagine another scenario: everything happens like it did in our real timeline. Except for the response. George W. Bush does not announce a war on terror, he announces that he refuses to be terrorized and largely keeps on truckin’ just like before the attacks. Other Western political leaders follow suit. Was this actually a possibility? Or was the population at large so thoroughly terrified in those first days that such a radical twist on actual history was practically impossible?

It seems clear to me that in the first scenario, where no one but a select few knows about the attacks, it would be relatively easy to take the alternative and, with the benefit of hindsight, more prudent and moderate approach to terrorism. But is the second scenario possible? Or would the political backlash following an announcement that amounted to “we will not radically alter our society in order to combat terrorism” have felled any political leader who dared to attempt it? I don’t know the answer, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.

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Other things. Condorcet’s paradox is a voting paradox that shows how the majority vote may conflict with itself.

Richard Feynman explains how fucking magnets work. Uh. Or not. He’s kind of being an ass, but at the same time, he’s making several important points: (1) there’s always going to be more fundamental explanations, deeper questions to be asked, and it’s hard to know which level of detail will satisfy any given person; and (2) some things basically cannot be explained to laymen in more fundamental terms without either compromising scientific integrity or educating them so far that they’re no longer laymen. And you wouldn’t ask the founding father of quantum electrodynamics to compromise on scientific integrity when speaking about magnets, would you? He then sort of goes on to give a layman’s explanation, except he undercuts his whole explanation by concluding, and I paraphrase, “I can’t explain this phenomenon to you in terms of anything you know better, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else, certainly not in terms of anything else you know better.”

Helge Skodvin. Some of his photographs remind me of Todd Hido’s through-the-windshield photos. And his favorite photobook is Uncommon Places. I like this guy.

Like mentioned, I’ve been to the Nordic Light photography festival this week, and I’ve filled an already overly full head with even more impressions, resulting in a wonderful/horrible jumble of thoughts which will hopefully result in some sort of coherent project within the next month. I haven’t fully digested that, or any of the other things on my mind, but I figure I’ll throw some of those things out there anyway. Because I think I’ve done a good enough job of editing this blog to not be a “mere scratchpad” that I can indulge sometimes.

Vee Speers, from The Birthday Party. Saw these on a wall, didn’t like them. Then heard her speak, looked at them again, and grew to like them some more. I also liked her earlier series Bordello and some even earlier documentary shots she showed during her talk that she had never exhibited anywhere. On the other hand, her series Immortal is the opposite of all that I like in photography, and she also said her newest series she was working on was shot on an iPhone — another thing I really dislike. (Attention, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects is one of the greatest photobooks of the 1980s. On This Site is wonderful. Why the fuck did you have to go and make iDubai?)

Ragnar Axelsson, Last Days of the Arctic. Not much to say here. Good pictures, period.

Joakim Eskildsen, The Roma Journeys. Ditto.

Pekka Turunen. He and Esko Männikkö presented a joint project they did on the Kola Peninsula in the late eighties and early nineties. Unusually, they worked together and present all their photographs together — there’s no telling who took which photograph. Really. Their styles, at least when they work together, are really similar. They’ve also done some great solo projects.

These guys are Finnish and they were really Finnish. Pretty much checked off all the stereotypical traits on my mental checklist. Their English was pretty bad, so I didn’t get much of use from their talk, but the pictures are great, and what few words they managed to convey were pretty funny. When asked how he got close to his subjects, Männikkö — who’s done portraits of lonesome bachelors in remote parts of Finland — said his method was really simple: he drives his car around. When he sees something of interest, he stops his car, walks up to the front door, knocks and says: “I’m a fucking photographer. I like to take photographs. Can I photograph you?” And people usually say yes. Embellished story or not (probably), I like the unapologetic approach and wish I had some of this dude’s balls.

Aside from those, there were tons of people, tons of photographs, tons of impressions. Some great, many not so great. I take no great satisfaction in criticizing successful players in the professional game I’m trying to enter, but a lot of the pros flown in to exhibit and talk about their works were simply horrible. Oh well, so it goes. I gravitate towards work I like and ignore the rest.