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United States of America

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

New York

In the distance lies (the skyline of) New York, as we descend into Newark, New Jersey. The county in which Newark sits is called Essex. So you could say that from Newark, every way is Essex. Other than Essex, there are of course many familiar placenames in this part of the colonies.

When I asked a local resident the temperature yesterday, and he said “96 degrees” it evoked a Third World song of that name, which took my mind back about 25 years. Marco on the Base describes the song as:

a dramatic and musically powerful retelling of the events of the October 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, headed by Baptist deacon and preacher Paul Bogle who led an armed group against the British authorities in Jamaica with his attack against the town of Morant Bay.

The scene that the song dramatizes is such a central one in Jamaican history. The band identifies with Bogle, the main figure in the insurrection. Even though this is a song that looks at history, it achieves exactly what the best reggae songs do: it brings history home. The song is based on a historical fact, but it is never overt: at no point does it mention Bogle or Morant Bay. The year is the major clue to the poem’s meaning. The listener has to do some work.

Although the rebellion was crushed, as the song “1865 (96 Degrees in the Shade)” makes clear, Bogle’s actions reverberated across Jamaican history, sparking further revolts until the island finally won independence. Bogle is considered one of Jamaica’s greatest heroes and he is forever memorialized by the song which is among Third World’s most popular.

The song describes the day on which the portly Governer of Jamaica executed the two local leaders (Paul Bogle and George Gordon) after the failed rebellion pour encourager des autres.

Posted by bigblue on 25/07/2012 at 06:47 AM
Filed under: Americas • USA • (0) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •

Sunday, 07 August 2011

Hiroshima Day

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Yesterday, 6th August, was Hiroshima Day.

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.

(via Dean Whitbread).

Posted by bigblue on 07/08/2011 at 09:09 PM
Filed under: Europe • France • United Kingdom • Asia Pac • Australia • Japan • Middle East • Americas • USA • Africa • South Africa • (0) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •

Sunday, 17 July 2011

Banking at night

As one does ... using the drive-in bank. And after withdrawing some money money why not drive over to the drive in restaurant for some food? There are a couple of drive in restaurants a hundred metres away ... but no need to walk.

I took this photograph in Vernon Hills, Illinois, in May this year, and it gives a clue as to why (although there are plenty of them) the paved pedestrian pathways are seldom used.

Posted by bigblue on 17/07/2011 at 07:33 AM
Filed under: Americas • USA • (0) Comments • Permalink • Bookmark or Share •

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Sunrise in the skies

Four and a half hours after the sun had set.