Andrew Sullivan: Leaving the Right

Andrew Sullivan in his blog, The Daily Dish:

ScreenHunter_03 Dec. 02 12.14 You can hold certain principles inviolate and yet also be prepared to back politicians or administrations that violate them because it's better than the actual alternatives at hand. I also understand the emotional need to have a default party position, other things being equal. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so – against the conservative degeneracy in front of us.

He later goes on to say:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a “radical leftist” as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.

More here.



Mary Carmichael in Newsweek:

Spaul_lg At first glance, Paul's HIV vaccine looks familiar; it uses the “neutralizing antibody” strategy, which calls on the body's B cells to make proteins that fight the virus. This approach is how all existing vaccines for other diseases work, but it hasn't succeeded against HIV. The virus is too smart to fall victim to the human immune system. It hides many of the identifying proteins on its outer coat, cloaking them from the prying eyes of B cells, and thus no antibodies are made.

A few proteins on the outside of the HIV virus remain naked and exposed. They have to, in order to bind to human cells and kill them. Paul has his eye on one of these proteins, called gp120. According to his theory, it is a superantigen, a protein related to a fragment of a retrovirus that wormed its way into the human genome hundreds of thousands of years ago and stayed there.

Paul says that because gp120 is a superantigen, it's similar to something the body has seen before. That means the immune system can make antibodies against it—just not enough of them, because after infection, the viral protein sabotages the B cells' assembly line. This is where Paul's vaccine comes in. By chemically manipulating gp120 and administering it as a vaccine, he says, he can cause the B cells to ramp up their production of unusually powerful antibodies, thwarting the virus's attempts at sabotage, arming the immune system, and protecting the body against HIV.

More here.

People Hear with Their Skin, As Well As Their Ears

From Scientific American:

Skin-hearing-airflow-puff-sound-perception_1 The act of hearing is a group effort for the human body's organs, involving the ears, the eyes and also, according to the results of a new study, the skin. In 1976 scientists discovered the importance of the eyes to our sense of hearing by demonstrating that the eyes could fool the ears in a peculiar phenomenon named the McGurk effect. When participants watched a video in which a person was saying “ga” but the audio was playing “ba,” people thought they heard a completely different sound—”da.” Now, by mixing audio with the tactile sense of airflow, researchers have found that our perception of certain sounds relies, in part, on being able to feel these sounds. The study was published November 26 in Nature.

Normally when we say words with the letters “p,” “t” and “k,” we produce a puff of air. This puff helps the listener distinguish words with these letters from those with the similar sounding “b,” “d” and “g,” respectively, even though the puff is so subtle that most of us do not even notice feeling it. “Unless you're a microphone manufacturer or a radio jockey or a phonetician, this isn't something that you're aware of,” says Bryan Gick, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and lead author of the study. Donald Derrick, a graduate student in the University's Department of Linguistics, is the other author on the study.

More here.

Tariq Ali on Pakistan and the Global War on Terror

An interview with Tariq Ali by Mara Ahmed and Judith Bello, in CounterPunch:

Tariq_ali Mara Ahmed and I were given the opportunity to interview Tariq Ali when he spoke at Hamilton College in Upstate New York on November 11, 2009, during his recent speaking tour of the United States. Tariq, a native of Pakistan who lives in England, is a well known writer, intellectual and activist. He has traveled all over Southwest Asia and the Middle East while researching his books. Mara, who is working on a film highlighting the opinions of the Pakistani people regarding the current situation in Pakistan and the Western initiated 'Global War on Terror', had a lot of questions for Tariq about the internal state of Pakistan. I wanted to ask Tariq for his opinion about the effects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what alternatives he thought might be available. –JB

Mara: What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror. Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?

Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we're just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they're not like us, they're Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.

It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and the Judeocide of the Second World War is having an impact. What sort of education is it if they can't relate what happened then to some of the things that are happening now. Education which just centers on one atrocity and that's all, where people feel very opposed to that [one atrocity], but they can support other atrocities, is in my opinion not a proper education. And some of the level of ignorant comment on Islam and the Islamic world in the United States is deeply shocking. That's all it is. It's ignorance.

More here. [Thanks to Yousaf Hyat.]

3 Quarks Daily Prize in Politics

December 21, 2009, NOTE: Winners announced. See here.

December 11, 2009, NOTE: See list of six finalists here.

December 10, 2009, NOTE: Voting round closed. See list of twenty semifinalists here.

December 3, 2009, NOTE: Nominations are now closed. Go here to see list of nominees, and vote.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

ScreenHunter_02 Nov. 21 17.35 In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Steven Pinker, on June 21st, and then announced the winners of the philosophy prizes, judged by Daniel C. Dennett, on September 22. We have decided to do the prize in politics next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in politics. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by renowned political author and intellectual Tariq Ali, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. He will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.

* * *

PrizePoliticsAnnounce The winners of the polictics prize will be announced on December 21, 2009. Here's the schedule:

Today:

  • The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of politics by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
  • Each person can only nominate one blog post.
  • Entries must be in English.
  • The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
  • The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after November 23, 2008.
  • You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
  • Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
  • Nominations are limited to the first 100 entries.
  • Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.
  • You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

December 2, 2009

  • The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
  • The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

December 9, 2009

  • Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

December 21, 2009

  • The winners are announced.

And another Mini-Contest!

For each of our contests, I have asked designer friends of mine to produce “trophy” logos that the winners of that prize can display on their own blogs. You can see three from the science prize here, and three more from the philosophy prize here. I am now running out of designer friends, so here is an offer: send me your design for a logo for the winners of the politics prize (it must contain the same info as in the examples I have linked to, and the size is 160 X 350 pixels), and if I use it, I'll send you $50. Try. It'll be fun. Deadline: December 10, 2009.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Scientists Grow Pork Meat in a Laboratory

News_652410aLois Rogers in the Times (via Crooked Timber):

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

The result was sticky muscle tissue that requires exercise, like human muscles, to turn it into a tougher steak-like consistency.

On Franz Fanon

Fanon2 Zia Sardar in Naked Punch via the excellent Amitava Kumar:

The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create. We are presented with a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious: I do not come with timeless truths;fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.

But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin, White Masks is a historic text, firmly located in time and place. Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of all those marginalised and firmly located on the fringes in Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative ideology, and the banality of the ‘War on Terror’. It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that are ridiculed, demonised, declared inferior and irrational, and, in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the Western civilisation in particular.

This anger is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for justice and equity. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully long self analysis, and even longer thought and reflection.

The New Inquisition

Nationinquis Apropos of recent discussions, Laila Lalami in The Nation:

In 2002 Manuel Valls, the mayor of Evry and a member of the Parti Socialiste, shot to national prominence when he tried to close down a halal supermarket because it did not carry pork or wine. He claimed the store had to “help us maintain some diversity.” Two years before his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy promised he would “hose down” the “scum” of the Paris suburbs, where many of the city's Muslims reside. Declarations such as these cut across party lines and constitute what the French press euphemistically calls dérapages, or blunders.

The reactions to the dérapages are also something of a tradition. Members of the offending politician's party rally behind him, while members of the opposition call him a racist. Meanwhile, leaders of the far right gloat that–at long last!–the mainstream is recognizing something they have been saying for years. After Chirac's infamous “noise and smell” comments, for instance, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Front National, gleefully insisted that the French would always prefer “the original to a copy.”

So it would seem that the perfect Muslim immigrant in France is one who cleans the house, picks up the trash, attends to the infant or, increasingly, fixes the computer, heals the sick and runs the bank, and then disappears in a wisp of smoke, before his presence, his beliefs, his customs, his way of dress, his “noise and smell” offend the particular sensibilities of the general population. France is not alone in wishing that its Muslims were invisible. As anyone who has visited Western Europe in the past few years will tell you, the “Muslim question” is a matter of grave concern.

being and time

ID_BS_CRISP_TIME_AP_001

You can tell a lot about a person by the relationship she has with time — what she values, how she works, and often where she came from. I have often wondered if my own anxiety about the wide expanse of the day goes back to my rural Kansas upbringing. Barred from watching television and encouraged (pushed) to explore the outdoors, the way I view the hours of the day correlates with the view of the horizon: flat, never ending, bichromal. I wake in the morning to wonder how in the world I will ever find a way to break that expanse into manageable chunks without falling into boredom or uselessness. Whether it’s the American motto “time is money,” or the Eastern European saying “When man is in a hurry, the devil makes merry,” the primary way in which a culture deals with the passing days marks the people who live in it. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long understood this, and used the way societies react to time — from how they divide their day to how they react to the aging process to the language they use to describe the past, present, and future — to tell the stories of what makes this culture unique.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.

bad romance

Jerry

“What is love?”

The 1993 global dance-pop mega-hit never answered the question, substituting instead a weak plea:

Baby, don't hurt me
don't hurt me
no more.

Christina Nehring also fails to define the emotional phenomenon she's charged herself with vindicating, but she certainly doesn't beg not to be hurt. Quite the opposite: for Nehring, truly loving means embracing pain. She disdains Valentine's roses, cozy snuggling, even vibrators—all the sappy rituals and pathetic artifacts our culture has produced to compensate for an epidemic lack of passion. By contrast, Nehring's old-style “love” is “a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism … ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess.” Today's “love” is commodified and ordinary and perpetually available. It can no longer ennoble our souls. Two apparently contradictory forces—the anti-feminist “cult of safe love” and the “man-hating clichés of old-style feminism”—have rendered us timid where we should be fearless. To re-inspire (or, as she might put it, “re-ensoul”) us, Nehring has written a polemic in the form of a parade of exemplary lovers from history and literature.

more from Emily Gould at n+1 here.

art nerds

Oldham091130_250

About eighteen months ago, the former fashion designer turned TV host turned bookmaker Todd Oldham moved his office from Soho, which he finally admitted had become “too like a shopping mall,” to an erstwhile law office in a building across from St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. The main rooms have fantastic windows: They stretch nearly from floor to ceiling, providing spectacular views of both the chapel’s cemetery and the hive of cranes and activity that’s begun to fill up ground zero. Oldham was there on a recent afternoon, dressed like an 8-year-old boy in blue jeans and a slim piqué polo shirt covered in a pattern of grizzly bears. The only visibly adult touch is a bushy and graying beard, the sort sometimes seen on religious zealots who gather in Union Square. He is unfazed by the morbidity of his new view. “Calatrava’s designing the PATH station!” exclaims Oldham, who is prone to exclamations. “It’s going to be so beautiful.” And, indeed, suddenly the whole scene does look almost jolly, like something from a Richard Scarry picture book.

more from Amy Larocca at New York Magazine here.

Tuesday Poem

Acts

With regard to these acts: removal of clothing,
nudity in front of females and before prayer,
the belly a heap of wheat set about with lilies,

a brood of men with bushy locks, black as raven,
the shaving of beards O daughters of Jerusalem,
exposure to extreme temperatures, hot or cold, short

shackling to an eye-bolt on the floor,
spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
three hundred and fifty incidents of self-harm,

a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed,
hoods, goggles, lap dances during interrogation,
fear of dogs, the use of dogs; the acts in question

were perpetrated by known government officials,
their teeth a flock of sheep, evenly shorn.

by A. B. Jackson

publisher: The Times Literary Supplement, 2006

Have yourself a very merry black Friday

From Salon:

Gifts Do not take the misanthropic title of “Scroogenomics” at face value. Consider that the subtitle, “Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays,” doesn't apply to the beloveds on your “nice” list. And for God's sake, pay no attention to the child sobbing atop a red-wrapped package on the book's cover. Author Joel Waldfogel doesn't want to harsh on your holidays. In fact, he wants to make them better. In his sane, reasonable and conveniently stocking stuffer-size new book, the Wharton School economist elaborates on what those of us on a first-name basis with the folks at the return desk already know — that the glut of holiday overspending is a drain on both the wallet and the ho ho ho spirit. But the book is no polemic; it's a study in retail trends, spending and debt habits, and a simple call for a better use of our money than Itty Bitty Book Lights for people we barely know.

More here.

We May Be Born With an Urge to Help

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Baby What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

More here.

Naqvi’s prose is evocative of Nabokov

Anis Shivani picks “The 10 Best Books of 2009” in The Huffington Post:

ScreenHunter_02 Dec. 01 09.23 3. H. M. Naqvi, Home Boy (Crown). Three carefree, young Pakistani men–Chuck (Shehzad), Jimbo (Jamshed Khan), and AC (Ali Chaudhry)–think New York is theirs in the days just before 9/11. Of course their lives fall apart, and of course things can never be put together again. Home Boy is a superior contribution to the genre, its compassionate humor saving it from easy judgment. Naqvi's prose is evocative of Nabokov, in its immense energy; the vitality of the language reflects the immigrant's resourcefulness in standing up to the nightmares of bureaucratic rectitude. The prose creates a new life, an expressiveness not always available to the native-born lazily deploying the proprietary language. It is interesting that both Torsten Krol and H. M. Naqvi have hit on parallel formulas to take down the insanity of America in the present decade, and have left such a treasure trove of illuminating language.

More here.

The Images Dancing in David Gelernter’s Head

Evan R. Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Photo_2569_carousel On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. Watson Hall on the campus of Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. “Can you know something you don't know you know?” he asks the small group of students enrolled in a course called “Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda,” which, according to the syllabus, explores how cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind can distinguish “seeming from being” and locate “a man's (or your own) identity.”

An hour before class, Gelernter—technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target—had tried to locate his own identity. “I'm a misfit,” he said. “Most people fit in a groove and focus on one thing, but I cut across the grain of different areas.” In conversation, the eclecticism of Gelernter's mind is immediately apparent. An opinionated raconteur, he seamlessly transitions from literary criticism (“Deconstructionists destroy texts”), to trends in the art world (“Modern museums are devoted to diversity as opposed to greatness”), gender roles (“Women mainly work because of male greed”), contemporary politics (“Anti-Semitism in Europe is so intense that, I think, Hitler would have an easier time today then he did in 1933”), and earthier topics (“I am obsessed with sex and sexuality as much as anyone I have ever met”).

More here.

Mauro Refosco on Moving Your Hips to Forró Music

Jim Fusilli in the Wall Street Journal:

MauroRefosco_DV_20091129114201 Forró is a folk dance that originated in northeastern Brazil, and the percussion heavy folk music that accompanies it has co-opted the name. It’s said the word is derived from a Brazilian word meaning a party. And that was the atmosphere at the Highline Ballroom, as Forro in the Dark fans danced joyously during its set.

“You can’t help but move your hips,” Refosco said. “It’s the kind of music anyone can dance to. A good samba dancer is almost intimidating, or with salsa or rumba you just want to watch. But with forró, anyone can do it.”

The band comprises Refosco on the zabumba drum, which looks a bit like a tom-tom worn around the neck and played on both sides, resulting in two different tones; Davi Viera on percussion and vocals; Guilherme Monteiro on guitar; Jorge Continentino on vocals, tenor saxophone and the pifano flute, a wooden instrument; and Alberto Continentino on bass. All are natives of Brazil, Refosco from Santa Catarina, Viera from Bahia, and Monteiro and the Continentinos from Rio de Janeiro.

“Each one of us has his own story about how we came to New York,” said Refosco, who earned his Master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. “In January 1994, the week I graduated, I got a phone call from David Byrne and I joined his band.”

More here.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Siam I am

by Edward B. Rackley

Nature captivates in Thailand. Its beaches and islands are legend; its birdlife and tropical flora endlessly entertain. On this visit though, nature bored me. A relentless jetlag was partly to blame. Its disorientations so warped my perceptions and instincts that I acquiesced to its inversions, accepting the Thai night as my day. Also, I was hungry not for nature but for the artifice of human imagination: grand emanations of culture, artisanry, cosmology. Has our petty species generated anything that I’ve never seen, never imagined? In creativity is there redemption for Homo Faber? For answers to this question Thailand is a gold mine.Homo faber

Heavily subject to international marketing strategies and thus cast as the ‘Land of Smiles’, Thailand wants desperately to be permeated by magic. Of all possible reasons to be ‘desperately seeking’, permeation by magic is worthy enough, and seemingly free of ulterior motive. Orientalism and its facile seductions be damned, I thought, after my first week in country. If this place holds even one treasure of the human spirit, its authenticity will be self-evident to the most gullible and the most jaded.

From where I live it’s an 18-hour flight to Thailand. I learned to stop fighting jetlag long ago; it is now my companion and confidant. Wandering Bangkok streets and alleys at 3 am, nothing remained of the diurnal parade of human pursuit to entertain me. Roaming dog packs and the occasional buzz of a moto taxi broke the surprising silence of a vast urban labyrinth. I was left with night’s shadows and breezes, long walks along empty boulevards and closed shop fronts, the constant hum of yellow street lamps and neon. Repetition sets in and one begins inspecting a city for its anomalies, its artifacts of human touch, the physical traces of the shopkeeper at home ensconced in dreams.

Read more »