Hetalia: The Beautiful World Episode #10: Turkey&! Transcript

This episode has Turkey and Greece hanging out and Italy and Germany visiting Turkey.

{Caption: With Turkey!}

Turkey: So I will tell a story about misleading Hocha. Now clear out your ears or else!

Chibi Egypt: Huah…

Turkey: One day, someone asked Mr. Hocha, “How long do we have to keep repeating this life and death thing?”

{Caption #1: Cram}

{Caption #2: Cram}

{Caption #3: Cram}

{Caption #4: Cram}

Turkey: He replied, “Until heaven and hell are full! Hope that will happen later than sooner though!” Hahahahaha!

(Chibi Egypt: Hehehehe!)

Chibi Greece: But…

Chibi Egypt, Turkey: Hm?

Chibi Greece: Death is not the end, friends.

Turkey: Nayah?

Chibi Greece: When your body ceases to exist anymore, is that when death occurs? If evidence you existed disappears, then would not that also mean those who fail…

Turkey: Great, look. Greece has slipped into his philosophical mood again

(Chibi Greece: …to leave their mark on this world cease to exist all together?)

Turkey: Go! Bring me sweet food, Egypt!

(Chibi Greece: I want to pet cats. I want to pet cats)

Chibi Egypt: Great. Heaheah…

Chibi Greece: Want to pet cats. Spoiler alert: I want to pet cats. Want to pet cats. I want to pet kitties.

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Mochi Greece: Awhehehehe…

Turkey: Hey, what’s it doing, Greece? How’s the hanging, as it is said.

Greece: I don’t know how to answer that, so I’ll say I guess so?

Turkey: Do you not get my hippity hoppiting at all?

Greece: Aaaaah!

Turkey: Does that mean you want to fight?

Greece: I’m up for it if you are. Let’s go.

Turkey: Okay, we’re gonna brawl, mothertrucker!

Greece: Ehuh?

(Turkey: Hm?)

Greece, Turkey: Hm…hmmmm…heah, heah, heah!

Narrator: One of the few things these frenemies have in common is a passion for the power of dance.

(Greece, Turkey: Eum eum eum uhah…heah heah…heam heam!)

Turkish guy: I was just practicing drums. Now these weirdos won’t stop with the twerking.

(Greece, Turkey: Heah heah heah!)

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Cat: Meow! Meow!

Cyprus: It’s time for you to make friends for real with Turkey and don’t tell me no, Greece, just find a way to make it happen!

Greece: I’m trying. Believe me, Cyprus. The problem is I can’t help but punch him in the face. My eyes, whenever I close them, I see…so many Turkeys, I get scared.

(Dream Turkeys: Hahahahaha!)

Cyprus: You see multiple Turkeys? That is what they call a nightmare!

(Dream Turkeys: Hahahaha!)

Cyprus: You’ve known each other so long. Surely you’ve got some good memories with him.

Greece: Uh…

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Turkey: Haha! What a joke are you talking about! Come with me, you lazy dumb moron guy!

(Greece: No. I think I rather just sit on the grass and play with my cat)

{Caption: Steamy...}

Greece: Ugh…so hot!

Turkey: Hahahaha! See, guy, aren’t you glad you got naked with me?

(Greece: Ugh… heaheaheaheah…)

Turkey: How’s it feeling?

(Greece: Ow, ehehehehe…)

Turkey: It’s what they calling a whole body scraping and you’re welcome!

(Cat: Meowowowow…)

Greece: Please don’t do that to my front side.

(Turkey: Heah heah heah heah heah!)

Turkey: No man alive has the stiffness after this glorious attack!

(Greece: Uhehehehe…)

Turkey: Neyah!

Greece: Yeah, not stiff just now. You can stop!

(Turkey: Yaaaaaaahhhhh!)

(Cat: Meaaaaaaaaa!)

Turkey: It is cool, bro, I’ll wash you all the way to hell! Meet a madly gangster scrubber move!

(Cat: Meowowowowowowo!)

(Greece: Ehehehehehehehe!)

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Greece: I suppose taking a bath with him was pretty fun.

Cyprus: Wait, I thought you only took baths with me!

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Mochi Greece: Mm…

Cat: Meow!

Narrator: According to the Internet, the Galata Bridge is a great place to grab a bite and watch the locals.

Italy: Germany! Smile for the camera!

Germany: Nein!

(Nein!: No! → German)

Germany: My face is perfect just the way it is.

Turkish pickpocket: Mine!

Italy: AAH!

Germany: Achtung!

(Achtung!: Attention! → German)

Narrator: Reviews also say watch out for pickpockets. Apparently they’re a lot stronger and faster than they look, so they can be difficult to catch.

(Turkish pickpocket: Hahahahahahahaha!)

Turkish guy: Look, it is Steve!

Turkey: Huh? Nah! You bad man! Picking the pocket in broad daylight! What the kebab are you thinking?! Pulling stunts like that will keep these suckers from visiting me!

Narrator: Good thing Turkey ain’t having none of that.

(Turkey: I think you want a squeeze!)

{Caption: Squeeze!}

Germany: He’s a lot stronger than I thought!

Italy: Oh yeah! Turkey is the strongest ever! Ciao, Turkey!

(Ciao: Hello → Italian)

Turkey: Selam!

(Selam!: Hello! → Turkish)

Italy: Thank you for catching that guy! Tante grazia!

(Tante grazia!: Many graces! → Italian)

Turkey: I just wanted you to be able to rest easy and enjoy the splendor and radness of my home.

Italy: Tee-hee!

Turkey: Go figure, man! I can’t believe how you have the mellow now, Italy!

Italy: Tee-hee! That’s right, I did a lot of crazy things, huh?

Germany: Wait, Italy did what?

Turkey: Yeah, I made the mistake of bullying him. He kicked the baklava outta me!

(Dream Chibitalia: Hmpf!)

Germany: Wait, Italy did what?!

Turkey: I still can’t believe you took me down all by yourself! I thought for sure you were a demon!

(Italy: Auah!)

Italy: Ah!

Germany: WAIT, ITALY DID WHAT?!

♡ .┊  a  quick  loot  at   𝑳𝑨𝑳 '𝑺 𝑰𝑵𝑺𝑻𝑨𝑮𝑹𝑨𝑴 𝑭𝑬𝑬𝑫  ft.    @frankiecortes   !   @agnesextra

Tips to Make a Language You’re “Forced” to Learn More Interesting/Enjoyable

Not everyone learning a second or third, or even fourth, language is doing it purely out of a desire to connect to a language or culture. Sometimes, you’re doing it because you have to for some reason or another.

Maybe you’re being relocated for work to a country where you don’t speak the language. Now it’s either learn Turkish to at least a survivable degree or be stuck using translator apps for the remainder of your stay.

You got a job as a cashier and it turns out a lot of the customers passing through only speak Spanish and you’re tired of the awkward mishaps that happen when you’re cashing said customers out.

You’re a first year student in high school and the only languages offered at your school are languages you have no interest in, but it’s a graduation requirement. Now you’re stuck picking the one you can tolerate the most for a school year so you can pass the class and get it over with.

Regardless of the reason, you’re stuck learning it for the foreseeable future and it’s not necessarily because you wanted to. We’ve all been there at some point, myself included. When something is more of an obligation, it’s pretty difficult to maintain any level of passion or interest for it, especially outside of class. I feel like that’s especially true for languages you had no interest in learning before suddenly being in a situation where you had to. The best advice honestly is to try and make the language more interesting to you personally that way, at least to some level, it’s less of a chore to study.

So for the language learners tied to a language due to obligation, these were my tips and tricks I did in addition to using the textbook and class. I’m not saying these are things that will make you fall head over heels for your TLO (Target Language of Obligation), but hopefully these are tips that will make your TLO a little more fun.

(TLDR at the end.)

Find content creators in your TLO that talk about things you like

I’m not talking about educational channels dedicated to teaching the language you’re learning like the Pod101 channels or Superholly. I mean entertainment.

You a fan of Danny Gonzalez or Jarvis Johnson reacting to terrible movies? Find an equivalent of them in your TLO. You like makeup tutorials or storytime videos? Look up ‘GRWM in Korean’, ‘メイクのチュートリアル’  or ‘storytime em português’. Or maybe you enjoy a good book review, or a review trashing 50 Shades of Gray for the tenth time in a row. ‘Reseña de 50 shades of gray’. Your language doesn’t need to be perfect, even the most basic vocabulary will get the point across and lead you to plenty of videos to choose from.

Vlogs, art, anime, song covers, Animal Crossing streams/speed builds etc. etc. It doesn’t matter. Use the amount of vocab you already know (or quickly searched on google) and make the youtube search bar your new best friend.

The same can be applied to other social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. If you like anime, find those anime news accounts on twitter but in French. If you enjoy content that discuss all things concerning the LGBTQ+ community, look up the equivalent terms in your TLO and start your search for those content creators.

This is a more interesting way to pick up on new vocabulary whether spoken or written, in a video and its comment section or on an Instagram caption.

Watch a show you’ve already seen, dubbed or subtitled in your TLO

If you’re a fan of anime or a user of Disney+, you are especially in luck. Shows like Boku no Hero Academia/My Hero Academia or The Owl House have been dubbed and subtitled all over in various languages due to their popularity. You can find entire episodes of the Moomin anime in Spanish on youtube.

You already know what’s going on because you’ve seen it in your native tongue, so you can pick and choose the least niche vocabulary and write it down on your notepad. Not to mention, this it is something you already like you might pay a bit more attention to it.

Additional tip: find a show in your TLO on Netflix subtitled in your language. Like murder mysteries? Rom-coms? Comedies? Netflix has a plethora of foreign films to watch that caters to various genres that could be in a language you’re learning. Try watching a foreign show with a plot that garners your interest.

Listen to Music in your TLO

We all have genres of music we enjoy listening to and there are usually singers of those genres in other countries. Rap, hip hop, pop, folk music specific to a country, you will find it somewhere. Just go to youtube search something like like ‘hip hop spanish’ and just click on one of those automatic playlist things youtube will suggest to you.

By doing that, I’ve found artists I personally enjoy listening to this day like IZA, Seu Jorge, Kaho Nakamura, Chila Lynn and Maluma.

Use Buzzfeed. I wish I was joking

Buzzfeed is certainly not the titan of the internet it used to be. And to quote Cody Ko, a lot of the times (especially nowadays) they tend to “Buzzfeed us some terrible content”. But the simple language and formatting of Buzzfeed articles and quizzes, make it a surprisingly effective way to learn new vocabulary.

Just by doing a ‘Which member of Anavitória are you ’(Quem é você no duo Anavitória?) quiz on Buzzfeed Brazil I was able to learn the Portuguese equivalents of red (vermelho), black (preto), yellow (amarelo), & white (branco) and Brazilian celebrities, among other vocab. A lot of the time videos on the youtube channels are either subtitled in the language or there are videos unique to those channels in the language.

This way, especially if you’re not a fan of Buzzfeed, you can laugh about the cringe in a different language while getting something out of it. Buzzfeed gets views and interactions, you get education and a good laugh. It’s mutually beneficial for everyone involved.

Try learning a little bit about a country that speaks your TLO or some Colloquialisms

Regardless of how anti-social some of us, myself included, can be I think deep down we all care about other people even if we don’t know them. We like seeing others succeed, we hate seeing others struggling, and to some extent we all recognize there is a shit ton of people living in the world that we don’t know. 

We don’t know anything about them and we don’t know their language or anything about the culture they grew up in. A culture that shapes how they interact with and view the world and how they may view people who come from your country. I feel like we all experience levels of sonder like that, especially if you’re someone who watches a lot of vlog content which really puts into perspective how you are seeing a small window into someone else’s life even if for a few minutes.

So try personalizing your TLO to some degree by learning about a country or culture that speaks it. 

Holidays, cultural quirks, historical figures, or idioms. You get some of that if you’re taking a language class, but try taking it outside your textbook.

Interested in art and learning Spanish? Try learning about artists from Equatorial Guinea and why they made a particular piece.

Interested in the aesthetic of weddings? Learn about wedding traditions in countries that speak your TLO.

Learning Turkish? Look up interesting factoids about certain words and phrases and their translations. For instance, the words for ‘Good Morning’ (günaydın) and ‘Good Night’ (tünaydın) respectively and literally translate to “the day is bright” and “the night is bright”.

In Brazilian Portuguese, there’s a phrase “ficar de conchinha”/”dormir de conchinha that means to cuddle that translates to “stay/sleep like little shells” which is really adorable. Another way to say Halloween is Dia das Bruxas which translates to ‘day of the witches’ and Dia dos Namorados which translates to ‘day of the lovers’.

One thing that also really developed my interest in Latin America when I was learning Spanish was looking at vlogs and seeing people walking around in their cities and noticing the differences in architecture. I also enjoy watching no commentary videos of people walking in different cities and feeling like I’m in that country myself seeing the sights and sceneries. (Ex ‘walking in Venice Italy, no commentary’.)

Look up Memes & the Meme Culture of your TLO

Everyone loves a good laugh so try to get some appreciation out of your TLO by learning about some of the memes or jokes. And not all jokes or memes are appreciated unless you know a specific language and culture that goes along with it.

For instance, when my at-the-time girlfriend told me about a little show called La Rosa de Guadalupe. Which she prefaced that, at least in Mexico the show’s origin country, it was a huge meme of a show because it was in a novela-like format with bad acting to go along with serious topics. One episode she told me about specifically was an episode about a girl with a cellphone addiction that escalated to a point where her mom threw her phone out the window, and then the girl jumped out the window for the phone. But through the power of a white rose and La Virgen de Guadalupe, her problems were solved.

It sounded so ridiculous, I had to see it for myself. So she sent me a video by a youtuber, Missasinphonia, who made commentary/reaction videos in Spanish about the show. 

It’s hard to be disinterested in a language if you’re getting a laugh out of it. And even if you don’t understand most of what’s being said, the visuals alone can lead to a laugh due to body language and tone giving you an idea of what’s going on. This especially becomes true as you learn more vocab that makes the videos or captions of a meme easier to understand.

Tldr:

Find content creators in your TLO that talk about things you enjoy

Watch things you’ve already seen in your TLO (dubbed, subbed, or both)

Listen to Music in your TLO

Use Buzzfeed, I wish I was joking

Try learning a little bit about a country that speaks your TLO or Colloquialisms

Look up the Meme Culture of your TLO

And that’s it. I hope this helps someone out. I’ve always seen posts or videos about how to enhance your language learning experience for languages you’re already interested in, but never anything about a language you’re NOT interested in. So I wanted to do something with that.

Like I said, this is by no means, tips to make you 100% fall in love with your TLO. I did with Spanish, but that’s not going to be the case for everyone else and the moment you no longer have to learn/use your TLO, you’re going to forget it quite quickly.

But hopefully, these are tricks that can help it become a bit more tolerable to learn.

Tip of the Nose : You Be For Men, My Scent

Does perfume really have a gender? Not remotely likely, says the purist, and don’t come telling me that virility smells like those pine-shaped car deodorant thingies. Everybody knows that real men smell of lavender.

This article is actually a rewrite of my response to this post, which my dying aging computer ate right before I thought about saving three hours worth of work. I’m not entirely sure what burning frustration and bitter regret are supposed to smell like, but if someone wishes to bottle it, they may as well name it Parfum de Hel.

On a side note, one of the participants to the earlier conversation had me blocked for some previous reason—probably unrelated to perfume discourse—so I could not reblog the initial post; nor am I willing, out of politeness, to simply caption the discussion. Therefore, here is the original post, and following is the segment I will more precisely address:

@thatiswhy:

Also, maybe I hate the mainstream cotton candy uwu line for women but don’t want to smell like a fucking frat house trying to deo away the smell of vomit on the carpet. You know what I want to smell like? White musk, and leather, and cedar, and sandalwood, and old parchment, and vetiver, and various teas, and juniper, and citrus, and cypress, and cashmere wood, and maybe in the summer like orange blossom and jasmine or fresia. These notes, while mostly present in women’s perfumes, usually are combined with overbearing fruity or flowery tones that make it smell like an aging late 17th century courtesan’s drawers, or “oriental” scents that make the whole thing reek like a 1920’s opium den. (Seriously, I have walked into a perfume shop, asked to be shown something fresh, woodsy and clean, and had Gabrielle shoved under my nose, which smells like rosewater-flavoured Turkish delight.)

Let women smell of non-jellybean scents, you cowards.

That being said, I have found all but two scents for men (to date) that don’t smell absolutely abrasive. (I’m suspecting the cheap synthetic ambergris.) 99.9% of the stuff directed at men smell as if I had one of those scrubbing metal wire thingies shoved up my throat. So no, I don’t want to shop at the men’s section, I want to be given the opportunity to find a scent that doesn’t say 80’s cartoon for girls and/or I read palms for a living.

There are many things to address in this fertile, if angry, intervention, and like often I’m starting by the end and by making a remark that has little to do with the subject at hand: I don’t think, my darling Tatty, that the ‘abrasive’ harbinger of olfactory doom you perceive in most ‘masculine’ fragrances would be synthetic ambergris, cheap or other. All ambergris today is synthetic, to begin with—well, not all, but natural ambergris is so terrifyingly expensive that we’ve got to forgive perfumers for furnishing us with only an approximation. Ambergris is extremely rare a substance; think around €10,000 per kilogram, in the lower estimation. Back in 2016, a nearly two-kilo block found by a man who was walking his dog on a Lancashire beach sold for £50,000… People have become millionaires over ambergris, although most of the time one only finds small quantities of it at once.

   Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for gray amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odourless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine-merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavour it.

  Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1922), chapter XCII, ‘Ambergris’.

In perfumery, ambergris is distilled into an alcohol-based solution known as ‘pure amber’ which, when exposed to air and sunlight, can be separated into several derivatives, notably terpenes and steroids. In fact, ambergris is mainly constituted from ambrein (25–45%) and epicoprosterol (30–40%). Ambrein is progressively degraded by sea water, sunlight and air into several compounds which are chiefly responsible for its smell, notably ambroxide and ambrinol. Modern perfumery uses ambroxide as a substitute for natural ambergris, which is easily synthesised from… a type of sage plant! To be exact, from sclareol, a fragrant chemical compound found in clary sage (Salvia sclarea). Sclareol kills cancer (yes.), and also it smells really good, with a sweet, balsamic scent very reminiscent indeed of the most important notes of natural ambergris.

Ambergris is essentially mucus naturally produced by certain sperm whales (it is believed that less than 5% of the species produces ambergris, possibly the largest of them, which prey on bigger animals) to protect their intestinal tract from lesions caused by the passing of sharp objects, chiefly undigested squid beaks: eventually, the whale excretes this soft, blackish, pungent concretion which is going to drift for a long while before landing on the shore, where it’ll spend maybe years drying out and hardening under the sun and the air. The colour lightens to a golden grey, and the smell gradually sweetens to a salty musk with whiffs of honey, tobacco and leather—depending on the block, the notes will vary in proportions and in potency.

Almost needless to say, then, that the number of perfumes using authentic ambergris isn’t especially high. Conversely, synthetic ambroxide is a beloved template of the modern perfumer’s palette, one of the reasons being that it helps stabilise scents very well. So popular, in fact, that specialists speak of 40% of the perfumes created in the last thirty years using it! Ambroxide was first synthesised in 1950, by Max Stoll for Geneva-based Firmenich SA. That means that Aimé Guerlain had to use natural ambergris when he created the masterpiece Jicky in 1889 (the oldest perfume in the world to be sold without interruption since its creation), even though Jicky was amongst the very first perfumes to use synthetic ingredients! Most notably, Jicky pioneered a great use of several synthetic molecules, chief of which vanillin, the synthetic vanilla which had been discovered in 1874 by German chemist Ferdinand Tiemann. (The first perfume using synthetic ingredient was Houbigant’s Fougère Royale in 1882, using coumarin, one of the key molecules of tonka beans.)

According to the legend of Jicky, it was composed by Aimé Guerlain (one of founder Pierre Guerlain’s two sons, and the second generation’s in-house perfumer, whilst Gabriel was the manager; then came Gabriel’s own sons, master perfumer Jacques and manager Pierre. The last family perfumer was Jacques’ grandson Jean-Paul, who retired heirless in 1994, after which the company was sold to soulless, tentacular multinational LVMH, much to the dismay of Guerlain aficionados all over the world) ... in memory of a broken heart he suffered in his youth as he came back to France after studying in England without his lady love, the lovely ‘Jicky’. Though mostly advertised to a female clientèle, Jicky shocked many a respectable woman of the time by its daring use of sensual animal musks (ambergris, musk, castoreum, and the devilishly sexual civet) at the heart of its balms, spices and aromatic flowers, most especially lavender, luxurious iris, sultry sandalwood and hot leather... Until the 1910s, when women’s press began recommending it, Jicky was quite the sensation amongst... English dandies... and Marcel Proust, of course. (In 1925, for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Jacques Guerlain presented a twist on Jicky, in which he had removed lavender and woods but added bergamot and, especially, a massive dose of ethylvanillin [three times more potent than vanillin!]: Shalimar was born.)

Men and women used to wear the very same perfumes. Until the 19th century, really, the market wasn’t segmented and there was no such thing as a masculine scent. When the European courts started bathing again and heady perfumes fell out of fashion to the benefit of lighter, tarter, fresher fragrances modelled after the famous Eau de Cologne (1708), women wore them too. The French Jean-Marie Farina who became with his own Eau de Cologne (1809) the official perfumer of the imperial court furnished Empress Joséphine as well. It was for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, that Pierre Guerlain created his 1853 Eau de Cologne impériale in the famous ‘bee bottle’ (with his 69 bees symbolising the Empire), which earned Guerlain the envied title of ‘Patented Perfumer of Her Majesty’.

The real difference in perfume usage that occurred during the 19th century was actually a matter of social marking via the use of perfumes of varied qualities, complexities and prestige: if perfume remained an element of luxury, now the aristocracy wasn’t alone in this privilege; moreover, clothes weren’t so elaborate and expensive anymore, and social differences were expressed in subtler ways than before the Revolution. In Paris, House Guerlain furnished a more aristocratic clientèle, whereas the upper-middle class went to Roger & Gallet (successors to Jean-Marie Farina), Lubin or L.T. Piver; meanwhile, middle-middle and lower-middle classes patroned Bourjois and Gellé Frères. The lower-middle class also went to ‘perfume bazaars’ that proposed the same products on sale, plus low-quality products.

The first respectable (only) concurrent to French perfumery was actually England, thanks to the well-earned reputation of its barbers, who created their own fragrances, at once discreet, elegant yet tenacious. Those were scents designed to be applied on the skin as tonics in the first place, after an expert shave, and as such they were based on aromatics, chiefly lavender, made from the essence of the delicate English variety: in the beginning 20th century, Frenchmen often wore Yardley’s 1873 English Lavender, precisely, and it was something of an ubiquitous odour in cosmetic products more specifically destined to men, such as soaps and creams.

It is no wonder, then, that when Ernest Daltroff created the first ever perfume only for men, judiciously titled Pour un homme, in 1934, for House Caron which he co-founded with his brother Raoul in 1904, the fragrance was based on lavender, tenderly joined in matrimony with sweet vanilla and lying on a respectable, tranquil base of an ambre accord (vanilla, benzoin, labdanum, the ‘oriental’ assembly created by genius François Coty in 1908 Ambre antique, the family namer of ambrés perfumes) sandalwood and musk. Legend has it that Ernest, who loved lavender, added the vanilla to please Ms. Félicie Wanpouille, Caron’s artistic counsellor, whom Ernest might have loved even more than lavender. She had joined Caron in 1906 and their collaboration produced some of the most beautiful perfumes of the time, and most original: in 1919, they created the first ever leather-scented perfume, Tabac Blond, in 1927, Ernest made En avion as a gift to Félicie’s friend the star aviatrix Hélène Boucher... They also invented the ‘loose powder’ technique in make-up.

Félicie never left, but Ernest did, along with Raoul, when the Nazis invaded France: the Daltroff brothers were the sons of Jewish Russian immigrants, after all. Since Caron exported a lot of products and had opened a shop on New York’s 5th Avenue, Ernest emigrated to the United States in 1939. He never came back, and died in Canada in 1941. But Félicie Wanpouille stayed, in spite of the Occupation, keeping Caron afloat; 1941 was also the year she got the genius idea, since she couldn’t pay the heavy taxes the Nazis imposed on Jewish-made goods, to rename Pour un homme into Pour une femme, a name which it kept until the war ended. To this day, Caron remains one of the very houses to be devoted entirely to perfume—and free of any multinational’s influence, for that matter. (They’ve not, alas! remained free from the clutch of Reformulation, but that is a story for another day.)

There are two very good reasons why Tabac Blond bears this name. The first was purely commercial: in 1919, women were beginning to smoke, but they smoked almost exclusively blond tobacco from Virginia, which was considered too feminine for men. The second was that blond tobacco exhales honeyed mossy notes which the perfume evoked tantalisingly alongside the darker leather, the cooler iris and the warmer amber, meaning that it was the perfect perfume to cover the smell of tobacco smoke. Two years later, Molinard released the wonderful Habanita, in a small bottle shaped like a cigarette lighter, as an oil to dab the tip of your cigarette so as to make women’s clouds suaver (it was released as a proper perfume in 1924, and long advertised as ‘the most tenacious perfume in the world!’, not without reason).

It wouldn’t be illogical to consider that if there are masculine scent in the first place, it’s probably because femininity went through some drastic changes from the late 19th century onwards, especially as a consequence of the two World Wars. The daring, tobacco-covering orientals which the flappers favoured were a direct reaction to the dreamy flower ideal of the previous decades, notably the artificial immobility of the Victorian woman and her continental equivalents, which the Roaring Twenties more or less exorcised with a call to adventure and independence. Women wore more perfume and more daring perfumes; it was only expected that men would start wearing perfume, real perfume again.

Something really odd happened in the 1980s, but maybe that, too, was to be expected: a kind of paradigm shift occurred in perfumery, as the laundry detergent companies which had become extremely rich and powerful thanks to the combined power of advertisement and mass consumption bought most of the perfume houses, perfume started imitating cosmetics more than the reverse. Once upon a time, the cosmetics industry would copy, or try to, the scents most popular in perfumery, like L’Oréal’s Elnett hairspray famously reprised Chanel’s  Nᵒ 5’ aldehyde overdose. Now, trendy perfume smells like shampoo or body spray.

It seems, nonetheless, like the ancestor of all terrible men’s perfumes that smell like body spray—the men’s version, the kind that makes you want to claw your own nose off—was the otherwise respectable Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982). So beloved by the public that every hygiene or cosmetic product targeted towards suddenly attempted to smell like it. Drakkar, however, was a good perfume, even if by today’s standards it would be perfectly unwearable for one’s entourage (in a vicinity of approximately 30 metres). ‘Powerhouse’ doesn’t begin to describe the type of scent that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s. And then they started using Calone™. Like, a lot of it. Have you ever smelled calone? Wait, you have. You’ve hated it. Calone in itself was a great chemical revolution: finally, the possibility for perfumers to imitate the very odour of water! Bring in the marine-like scents! Bring in the marine-like scents... I kinda want to throttle Calvin Klein for Escape (1991). Whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not approach anything subtitled ‘Sport’. It’s worse. It’s way worse. (These days, calone is used to give a ‘watermelon’ aspect to everything, but chiefly summer flankers of denatured classic feminine perfumes. A hint: it smells like shampoo. Everything does.)

You can blame advertisement for convincing men to wear perfume on top of extremely pungent deodorant, too, but me personally, I strongly resent women who think classics are ‘too feminine’ and want to shop at the men’s section of their local perfume supermarket because it’s supposed to be ‘gender-defying’. It really isn’t. That’s not what equality is about, getting to smelling just as bad as the dudes, it isn’t. Even more importantly, perfume is not gendered; marketing is. Skin chemistry varies noticeably from person to person and our hormones do play some role in what we smell like, and therefore in what one perfume will smell like on different people, but apart from that, any sex-based olfactory discrimination is but a marketing ploy to exploit a segmented market so that the members of one household purchase and consume as many differentiated items as possible. Mainstream perfumery these days is mostly hopeless: the Thinking (wo)Man would be well inspired to turn to ‘niche’ perfumery, which isn’t always that confidential but presents the great advantage of being generally more creative and personal. Websites exist where people exchange ideas and samples and there is a whole alternative market for scents that allow people not to ruin themselves buying a full bottle of certain great fragrances. Overall, it is a nice way to get to wear something that feels like a personal choice.

Twitter Adds New Feature to Caption Voice Tweets Automatically

Twitter posted a voice tweets feature over a year ago and it’s soaking up a lot of heat due to its lack of accessibility features. Now it finally launches the auto-generated subtitles that appear when you click the “CC” button. This new feature is only available for iOS as voice tweets have not arrived on Android yet.

The inscriptions are in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean and Italian. They will only appear in new voice tweets because they need to be created when the tweet is created, Twitter told The Verge.

We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today. Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on web, click the “CC” button. https://t.co/hrdI19Itu6 pic.twitter.com/pDlpOUgV6l

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2021

Credit: Twitter

When voice tweets were first tested last June, critics were quick to point out that they should have subtitles in the first place, as required by US federal law.

Twitter later acknowledged that there was no dedicated accessibility team. Twitter relied on employees to devote extra time to these functions. Since then, however, the company has created a team dedicated to accessibility.

The company initially promised to add auto-labeling in early 2021, but that date seems to have been pushed back a bit.

Twitter has assured that he will improve his services and also expands its products market. “While this is still early days and we know it won’t be perfect at first. This is one of many steps we are taking to expand and strengthen the accessibility of our services. We look forward to continuing our journey of truly inclusive services. said Gurpreet Kaur, director of global accessibility at Twitter.

 This new subtitle feature comes in handy after TikTok released automatic video subtitles in April as part of a broader strategy. It will help to make the platform more inclusive for deaf or deaf users.

Instagram announced that it has been working on subtitles for Stories since May. In September 2020, Twitter said it hoped to provide audio transcriptions in early 2021 by forming two new teams to work on platform integration and accessibility.

“As part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible to everyone. We are introducing automated voice tweeting for iOS,” said Gurpreet Kaur, head of global availability for Twitter, in a statement.

“While it’s still early days and we know it won’t be perfect at first. This is one of many steps we’re taking to expand and strengthen the accessibility of our services. We look forward to continuing our journey of truly inclusive services. – added Garprey.

Currently, the new subtitle feature is only available for iOS users. It is currently unknown when it will available for Android users. If you want to see the subtitles of a tweet, you need to tap on the CC icon located in the upper right corner of the voicemail window.

The cited source notes that subtitles only appear on new voice tweets. It generally means that not all old tweets contain subtitles. The company’s microblogging site also offers subtitles for Twitter Spaces.

Read more WhatsApp Will Soon Allow Users to Send Messages Without Their Smartphone’s

Published in Lahore Herald #lahoreherald #breakingnews #breaking

CEFR levels: what are they? And do they matter? In the language-learning community, we often hear other learners throw around certain terms when they’re talking about their level in a language. “I speak German at a B1 level” or “I’m an A2 in Russian.” But what do B1 and A2 mean? These descriptors are skill levels in the CEFR system and they’re used by language learners to measure their ability in a language. What are the Different CEFR Levels? The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, often referred to as CEFR or CEFRL, is an international standard for working out your ability within a language. It was established by the Council of Europe and aims to validate language ability. The six levels within the CEFR are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. With these levels, you can easily work out your ability in around 40 different languages. The levels are often used casually by language learners to explain their ability at speaking, reading, writing and understanding a language. But there are also exams and certificates available to those who want to make their level official. Let’s first take a look at what the different levels are and what’s possible for you at each level. The “A” Levels: Basic User A1 | Beginner At the A1 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand and use very basic expressions to satisfy concrete needs. Introduce themselves and ask others questions about personal details. Interact simply as long as the other person speaks slowly and clearly. A2 | Elementary At the A2 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand frequently used expressions in most intermediate areas such as shopping, family, employment, etc. Complete tasks that are routine and involve a direct exchange of information. Describe matters of immediate need in simple terms. The “B” Levels: Independent User B1 | Intermediate At the B1 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand points regarding family, work, school or leisure-related topics. Deal with most travel situations in areas where the language is spoken. Create simple texts on topics of personal interest. Describe experiences, events, dreams, and ambitions, as well as opinions or plans in brief. B2 | Upper Intermediate At the B2 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand the main ideas of a complex text such as a technical piece related to their field. Spontaneously interact without too much strain for either the learner or the native speaker. Produce a detailed text on a wide range of subjects. The “C” Levels: Proficient User C1 | Advanced At the C1 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand a wide range of longer and more demanding texts or conversations. Express ideas without too much searching. Effectively use the language for social, academic or professional situations. Create well-structured and detailed texts on complex topics. C2 | Proficiency At the C2 CEFR level, a language learner can: Understand almost everything read or heard with ease. Summarize information from a variety of sources into a coherent presentation. Express themselves using precise meaning in complex scenarios. When do the Different CEFR Levels Matter? The CEFR is often used by employers and in academic settings. You may need a CEFR certificate for: School admissions University course requirements Employment A CEFR certificate is very handy for your CV or résumé, and they often don’t expire. That said, many language learners use CEFR levels for self-assessment so that they can more clearly define what they need to work on, and work out what they would like to achieve in their target language. Aiming for higher CEFR levels are also a great way to make the transition from an intermediate learner to an advanced learner, and Fluent in 3 Months founder Benny Lewis has used exams in the past to force himself to improve and refine his language skills. If you’re looking for an extra push or for a way to break through a plateau, a language exam could be an effective way to do it. Motivation in language learning always matters. When do CEFR Levels not Matter? Outside of the professional or academic realm, CEFR levels are not as important. They’re really only necessary if you want to define where you’re at with your target language. In a more casual language-learning environment, or when you’re just learning languages because you enjoy them, then CEFR levels are just another tool to help with your language learning. [caption id="attachment_20741" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Sitting an exam requires a lot of study.[/caption] Sitting an exam requires a lot of study. If your goal is speaking a language, that time you spend reading, listening and writing to meet the exam requirements will be time you could have used to improve your speaking skills. In the past I’ve done exams for German, French and Italian as well as the HSK exam for Mandarin Chinese. In preparation for all these exams, I had to study materials that were completely unrelated to my end goals for the languages. So, if your language-learning goals do not align with the CEFR scale, and you don’t need a professional qualification, then you can safely ignore it. How do You Work Out Your CEFR Level? There are a few ways you can work out your CEFR level. Many learners opt for self-assessment, using the descriptions I shared above to gauge where they’re at. [caption id="attachment_20742" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A CEFR self-assessment.[/caption] For those looking for something a little more formal, you have the option of taking an official examination or a free online examination. It’s worth noting that CEFR levels cover a variety of skills. A full CEFR exam typically measures skills in listening, reading abilities, speaking, writing, translating and interpreting. That’s why some learners segment their abilities, for example stating that their listening in a language is at a B2 level but their speaking is only at a B1 level. Others just average out their abilities and say that they’re at a B1 level overall. CEFR Assessments and Tests Available Some of your options for official examinations (or for courses with certification) include: Alliance Française for French. Goethe Institut for German. Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge for Irish. Instituto de Cervantes for Spanish. CELI for Italian. European Consortium for the Certificate of Attainment in Modern Languages for Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, and Spanish. TELC for English, German, Turkish, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Arabic. ??st?p???s? ??????µ??e?a? for Modern Greek. Language Testing International for multiple languages. Lingoda for Spanish, French, German, and English. ALTE for many other languages. Online exams include: Exam English for English. Deutsche Welle for German. Cambridge English Language Assessment for English. Cambridge Institute for English, Spanish, German, and French. Language Level for English Spanish, French, and German. Macmillan Practice Online (paid) for English. European Center for Modern Languages for self-assessment in a variety of languages. Regardless of the exam you sit, language exams demand intensive study and are a great way to push your ability in a language to that next level. What About You? Did you ever sit an official exam whether it was based on the Common European Framework or not? How did you do? How do you feel about using the CEFR scale to define your level in a language? We’d love to hear from you in the comments! The post CEFR Levels: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Test Yourself appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.

K I've been following this blog for a while bc pretty art, but I admittedly haven't been paying a whole lot of attention and don't know much about Turkish history. Do you have a plot going on? Who's the baby? Fill me in

gosh, TvT I mean.. a good majority of what I post has to do with Turkish History and culture.. I would recommend just skimming through the blog if you want to learn more about it but if you have any questions specifically I’d be happy to answer them. I can’t.. fill you in on everything as a whole because it’d be a novel of a post and even then too little because summarizing history is never good enough… But anyways, thanks so much for the compliment but I really urge you to read my captions and follow the source links that I include in my posts if you’re genuinely interested! ;v; I also have a reblog queue for other posts that showcase Turkish history or culture

But otherwise, no, I don’t have a plot going on. My blog is primarily just a hub for Turkish History and Culture + Sadiq (Turkey Himself) being the outlet for it all. I like it because I think interpreting history through a “representative” or entity is a unique and interesting way to look at history!! I think the only downside to this is that he’s a Hetalia character and… I don’t know any “fandom canon” or “canon�� info so I stick to history books as “lore” instead of the show or books or fandom. 

The baby is TRNC or Kivanc [his normal “human” name]. I like to interpret TRNC to be the only offspring/child that Turk has and takes care of modernly because of how much attention and care the country puts into the territory where Turkey assisted Turkish Cypriots into making it their own place. I could go into further detail but I’m just staying general because I assume you didn’t want a 10-mile explanation like most of my posts do. T7T hahaha. Also, I mean, I imagine he’s about 4 years old (a little too big for a baby sack but I like to play around )

 But I don’t remember if I’ve made a post yet going over the specifics of their relationship and politics…. :0 I’ll look into making one if I get the ask or even just going on and making the post alone? I know I’ve gotten some when I was less inclined to be so detailed with my responses but I think I might just schedule a post where I explain fully. I apologize if it has been confusing to some followers!!   :-( 

Here are some posts that I include Kiv in !! ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

  Well we have been coming here twice a year since it opened and have never had a problem as did a review 4 years ago but put it in pages instead of posts. So what’s changed ?, minor point is a couple of years ago they changed from Nespresso machines to some crap cheaper copy, obviously saves money on contract, bath accessories still excellent Aqua di Parma. Now onto the 9 day stay with a couple of Spanish (non English speakers) friends for their first stay. This is still an impressive hotel architecturally, modern  yet extremely comfortable and expensive so it should be excellent. Try and go end of May or end of September as rates fall dramatically and you can get a junior suite with private pool for around £550.00 per night including breakfast.

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Entrance to Room

Private Pool & View

  Check in is always efficient, the guys out front are excellent at calling taxis or buggy’s to get you anywhere on the complex or taxis and their English has always been excellent. Free sparkling (no idea what it is but it’s not champagne) never tried it and cool towels for hands and face on arrival. All a bit down hill from here though this time around.

Got shown to a room 814 which as this place is built up a cliff/ mountain is the highest placed, apart from some private residences set well behind you. Not the room we were expecting, this is supposed to be an upgrade, ok we had a sea view but it’s still dark dingy and nearer to God and the heavens than the actual sea very similar view from the aircraft when landing and in a block of four which I never knew existed. To top it all the shower was situated in the window where the bath had been in every other room we had seen also the window was obscured by a large rubber curtain which does raise but then you can be seen from next doors deck.  As for showering with a rubber curtain that’s fine  but not when I’m paying these prices. Asked for our non upgraded room, asked nicely but didn’t want an argument over how much better this employee thought it was as I was sure he’s not staying here or paying the bill so I’m not interested in your opinion. Impossible to change as no rooms available because we are fully booked because of a big fat Indian wedding from England who have taken over the place but seemed to have booked it way after us. So that means that some wedding guests have got here before us didn’t  like the room we were given so being last we got stuck with it. Don’t give us the excuses we know how this works. Asked to see the General Manager, low and behold he’s not here, well it was 10.30 pm but he wasn’t here at all so the duty manager just did the usual kick the can down the road and hope for the best. Being Mandarin Oriental regulars here and in other countries we were informed that our profile had been looked at but obviously not opened and read as upgrade or not it’s not what we normally have. My social secretary was not amused and was saying we will check out and re position to the Aman Ruya which is also excellent and whilst googling during the conversation knew that this was available and we are going to decamp there now, it’s now getting on for midnight. This lead to tons of grovelling and was like trying to shift a humping dog off your leg all to no avail until. In three days we can offer you a suite with private pool at no charge, still my secretary was unmoveable as its still a third of our vacation. By now it’s 12.45am and I’m actually reaching the point of I don’t give a shit for one night so we stayed.

Things didn’t look much better in the morning as we woke up staring at a wall and in my opinion a naff B&O tv instead of the view as the room was to narrow for the bed to be turned facing the glass wall. The bed and sheets were as good and comfortable as always and on reflection is it worth the hassle of changing hotels for two more nights, answer no.

Breakfast has always been good so looked forward to that. On entering it was unsurprisingly full of the wedding lot with not enough staff. Every year you wander up and order your omelette from the bloke who cooks it adding whatever ingredients you want and can then stop him from cooking it until it’s rubberised. Not now he informed us it must be ordered from the table, all well and good but this added 40 mins to the whole breakfast as me and my Spanish mate ordered an omelette with everything. What arrived was a cold solid blob containing the main ingredient egg, no herbs, ham, onion or chilli, maybe a little direction or some form of management direction could of helped or even someone with more than four words of English could have been a bonus as we didn’t recognise any of the staff from previous years who had been fab.

Normally don’t eat in the hotel as it’s over priced and not the greatest but always pop into the bar for a couple before going out to dinner. Actually impossible this night as it was taken over by the wedding party with good old thumping music, great this is the only bar in the hotel so along with the few other guests not going to the wedding we were offered a drink in the outside fish restaurant, oh yeah and we can throw in a meal with that. Ok I know it’s a business and you have to make money but if you book a wedding to take over the bar and a restaurant book the whole hotel and you won’t have to appease guests with a duff second choice, strangely  for some reason the meal was only for two which as there was four of us seemed a bit odd but there was no option to eat elsewhere as the other restaurant was you guessed it taken over by the curry munchers. Anyway the fish in the restaurant was fine fresh and not overcooked but a lot pricier than places outside.

three days later we were moved and must say the room was excellent our friends were also supposed to get an upgrade but were out of luck as a large group from Google we’re staying and a big fat Turkish wedding had booked but were having the ceremony outside the hotel luckily. They were quite happy but the room overlooked the hotel entrance rather than anything else.

Pool deck was quiet as most guests were obviously elsewhere celebrating but it is really nice plus you can eat there as well. The better food we think is down by the private beach and is well worth the trek they do an excellent Gazpacho. The beach is good but they have walkways into the sea as it’s actually man made and there are lots of huge boulders to negotiate, the beach service is good.

      Mandarin Oriental Bodrum (again) Well we have been coming here twice a year since it opened and have never had a problem as did a review 4 years ago but put it in pages instead of posts.

Don McCullin Exhibition 

1. Looking at the war photographs, what aspects of war has he chosen to highlight?

In McCullin’s photography, he chooses to pay homage to the wounded. This does not mean just the men who were harmed on the battlefront, but all type of people who were wounded by war. Whether it be a physical ailment or emotional. He took great care into capturing the pain that these people went through and did it with quiet consent.

2. How do the information panels (the larger texts, and the labels beside each work) affect the way you read/understand the photos? To what extent can you understand what is going on in the images without the texts?

Throughout the entire exhibit, all the photos displayed were printed by Don McCullin, which tells me that this is how the specifically intended his viewers to see his work now. Originally McCullin’s work was displayed in magazine prints in full color. His choice to specifically go for black and white was deliberate. Within one of the information panels it wrote about the process in which he printed his photos. This was something that interested me very much. It stated that “He returns again and again to the negatives of his photographs, convinced he can surpass his previous attempts to produce the perfect print.”  His work was to do these photo’s justice, to capture these moments and portray them in a way that does not let the moment or image down. Knowing that his choices in shadow or light were deliberate is very important. By understanding the photo just by looking at it, McCullin lets his work speak for itself.  

3. Is there anything in this exhibition that you find problematic or that you think is worth of praise, or both? What makes it so – style, subject itself, a combination of both, other?

I think the thing that was most interesting and praise worthy was how McCullin approached his subject matter. There was one photo in which the caption read “Turkish Village” and information panel later spoke about how a grieving wife laid over the boy of her dead husband. It then went on to speak about how he felt honored that he was able to be in the room and capture those moments. That he grieved deeply for the family and their loss and felt humbled that they would let him be a part of their most vulnerable moment. This subject matter is not light, while some say that McCullin’s work is very harsh, he has taken to displaying the tragedies of life in a way that is done with care and compassion.

4. What, overall, can you understand about humanity from this exhibition?

I think that while in these photos it may seem like there is no humanity in the world, McCullin seems to show the opposite by finding the courage to take these photos and share them. His strength to do this work and keep doing it allows others to not only see the atrocities around them, but take a hard look at them and let them impact you. I really enjoyed that even through McCullin is known for his war time photography, he was still young and getting to see his first works put into perspective how the came to be. As well as his landscapes at the end of the exhibit. All in all, McCullin showed us that humanity is not just black and white, good and bad, there is so much to life that we must see to understand.

Then choose one section of the exhibition and analyse more closely how McCullin has depicted the subjects in that section:

VIETNAM

5. Why and for whom do you think McCullin took these photos?

I think that McCullin takes these photos for not only himself, but the world to see. The does so to bring awareness to the cruel truth of what is happening around him. As a documentary photographer the must feel some kind of responsibility to share these stories, especially the ones with tragic endings.

6. What is special about the way he has chosen to photograph the people in these photos?

He chooses not to move away from the dark subject matter, sometimes preferring it over anything else. In the first photo, and quite possibly his most notable one, McCullin shared that the staged this photo and this was the only photo the has ever staged. This was because of the circumstance of the photo, right after American soldiers went “souvenir hunting” McCullin went over and propped up the deceased soldiers trampled possessions and placed them rather strategically. McCullin said “He didn’t have a voice. The couldnt speak so I was going to do it for him.” This photo was by far the most compelling in the fact that it was so different and still held all those qualities that McCullin has in his work. The other two photos, show the subject matter in a more silhouetted form that to me showed the duality of war. Confession of sins, and then the destruction of community through a bombing. Both very different ideas shot in the same way.  

7. Choose 3 photos – one where camera angle is significant, one where focus is significant and one where lighting is significant. In each case, how does this influence the way you understand the message of the photo?

Camera Angle: In the first photo of the deceased man with his photos staged I feel that the angle of this photo was dilerbate in the way that it captured its subject. What draws my eye first is the image of a girl in the center of the photo. How it is surrounded by bullets and other things. Then my eye follows up to the hand of the fallen man in this photo, as if the was reaching out one last time to these material objects, his last teather to the world. The fact that this photo seems to be taken just a little above ground level shows how McCullin strategically captured the image. Knowing what he wanted in the frame and what he wanted out.  

Lighting: The second image is what I chose to speak about lighting significance. Though it may be hard to tell through the picture I took, the lighting in this photo seemed almost prophetic to me. In this photo it is described as a priest hearing soldiers last confessions. Though that idea is chilling, the lighting within the photo seems almost angelic, like a halo of light cast around these men. Also knowing that McCullin took great care in developing these photos, this use of lighting was intentional. As I stated before this photo seems like it is almost silhouetted. The men's faces are not seen, but their actions can be understood. This allows viewers to focus not on the details but instead the actions.      

Focus: The last photo, an image that plays with focus, is something that I found very interesting. McCullin chooses to keep the foreground of this photo blurry (the piece of metal/wreckage) and chooses to focus on the moving subject in front of it. There is a lot about this photo I would like to unpack but what I find most important is how chaotic the focus feels, which in itself can kind of mimic the action of this photograph. The grenade being thrown in this picture is still visible which is really impressive, and also the body language of the subject is articulated so well. The focus is solely on the man throwing the grenade which is a key element to this photograph. The helps viewers see and immerse themselves within the photography. It feels as if we to are behind McCullin’s lense seeing this happen before out eyes.

8. What is the relationship between the photographer and his subject(s) in these photos?

I think that McCullin is photographing untold truths within these photos. The most prominent one is the first one, he takes something, or more specifically someone and shares the truth fo what they have been through without any gimmicks. His photography is so extraordinary because the capture human life, good or bad, in a very natural way that allows its suidences to really look at it and understand. I appreciate his work and feel that McCullin is always just trying to capture life in all his work.

Princess of Waltzes

By Fevziye Rahgozar Barlas

From the April - September 1999 issue of Afghan Magazine | Lemar-Aftaab

[caption: Still from the 1983 Afghan film Moments لحظه ها ] 

The short story gives a glimpse of a lonely Afghan woman’s experiences at a refugee relocation facility in Europe. Almost 20 years after its publication, many Afghans continue to face this challenging trek of finding peace outside their homeland.  

A new morning was beginning, innocent and bright. Nahid woke up among the jumbled voices and noises of a hundred different nations, who were waiting downstairs in the logger lobby to receive their daily breakfast. All of the days started the same. The discord and the thin voice of Ms. Eli, who was responsible for the meal distribution of the refugees, joined the disturbance along with the angry screams of kids and the screeching sounds of pans and plates.

All residents of the logger had to get their breakfast in two hours, between seven and nine o'clock in the morning, and if they had a good reason, they could take their breakfast to their rooms and at least dine in a quiet atmosphere. This was a privilege usually granted to the elderly and families with small children.

Nahid got up from her ragged bed, only God knew all the people it had hugged each night up to that moment. The noisy springs of this mattress always disturbed her. Every night, each time she turned from one side to the other, this terrible noise troubled her while the sharp ends of the springs hurt her back and sides. She tried hard not to turn so often, not to move so frequently and would shift her position like a feather until she managed to fall asleep.

She came near the window and to her amazement, the sun was shining after weeks of rain. One could say, the sun was smiling, as if she was far from the sorrows of humankind. The green forest right across from Nahid's window was graceful under the caressing fingers of the sun. Nahid looked at this beauty for a while and remembered how she was scared, and trembled in fear, every night from the gloomy shadows of this thick forest.

Her room was on the third floor of this huge, abandoned building. The larger rooms on the lower floors were given to families with small children. Suddenly, she felt an ache in her heart. She had to go downstairs and join the queue of destitute, hungry people and pick up her sour, old cheese, bread and bitter, cold coffee or tea. She felt unsteady. The picture of a long line of hungry foreigners: Yugoslavians, Romanians, Russians, Indian and Pakistanis, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, and who knows how many other nations shaped up in front of her eyes.

The terrible glances of some ugly, dark Pakistani men along with the terrible smell of the logger residents, who only had two baths to wash themselves, and the awful stench of the invented food of the logger cooks, which Nahid had never seen before, all blended together and she thought this rotten odor which filled her small room was going to suffocate her. She pulled the curtain aside and opened the window. The pleasant incense of the rain-washed forest covered her face and body like a pale chiffon . She took a deep breath instantly and remembered a nice poem:

The lonely girl sat by the window and said,

O you! The daughter of the spring! I envy you,

Whatever you want I may pay for your essence,

roses, songs, and happiness!

She could not remember the poet, but she loved this poem and murmured it quite often. She thought how the girl in the poem resembled herself. She was the lonely, sad girl sitting by the window who had brought the beauty of spring on the other side. With deep grief, she watched the tender dance of newly-dressed green branches outside the cold and gray stone building of the logger.

Every day, groups of people were leaving this melancholic building while new ones arrived. She did not want to be the target of the stupid glances of the unmarried, thirsty men of the logger. She preferred loneliness by all means because she had no choice.

It rained almost on a daily basis. She imprisoned herself in her small room and listened to the melody of rain while she watched the dance of the raindrops on the window. Sometimes, the hungry birds would come near her window, but without sitting they would fly away as if they knew that Nahid did not have anything to give them. Sometimes, she watched the joyful and saucy plays and jumps of small, lovely squirrels among the branches. But inside all these moments, there was a screen of her past memories, her happy childhood and then her sorrows that suppressed the earlier sweet days.

Where were the days going? Each day was a repetition of the one before, boring and lifeless. Then, the nights would arrive. They always seemed darker, colder and lonelier than the prior ones. Nights were the times that Nahid shared the sad stories of her life and the remembrance of her loved ones. Many times, she tried to create some fantasies to overcome her fears, but it was not possible. Fantasies were crueler than the painful reality of her life in limbo.

They never came true. Many nights she could not sleep. She just felt like she was pulled into a deep and dark eddy. A kind of unconscious dizziness separated her from the world and she saw the dark end of the meaninglessness of life. Suddenly, a dim light would sparkle at the very top and she would find the desire to come out of this eddy, but when she eventually came out, there was no light. There was sadness, isolation, and desperation.

During the three months of her journey which took her from Kabul to Vienna, she had heard many stories of wandering and exile. She was so fed up with all these stories that she could not find the power to form and tell her own drama to anyone. She was unusually silent, with no charge, lament or protest. She never wanted to share her agony with those strangers who just wanted to find a new theme to gossip about and she did not care about her future either. She simply thought that almost all of the exile stories were the same, just like the arrival of the new days and nights.

Every night, when she saw the shaking shadows of the branches over the curtain of her window, which resembled the dried fingers and hands of a skeleton, or the movements of a restless, sinful ghost, she unwillingly remembered death. Then, she thought of the deaths of all of her loved ones. They had passed away in a twinkle. Her beloved father; her best friend, her mother who only knew how to love others, and her friends, who all had a terrible ending to their lives.

"What a short distance between life and death," she thought and felt that it was perhaps the best way. At least there would be no endless suffering. People were coming and going within a blink of an eye. Was life a kind of infant game that laughed, cried and then monotonously ended?

Sometimes she felt that she had sunk in slumber, no more guns, no more bombs, and bloodshed, but sometimes she had fearful and non-stop nightmares. They stroked her, they pushed her from the top to the very bottom, she was fading or falling, and then was being taken into the hollows of the skies like an untied balloon.

Breakfast was finished. The crowd of refugees departed in a rush as if they had something important to do. Maybe this revival was due to the sun which was shining so generously. Nahid, who had forgotten the advice of her grandmother and others regarding religion, said to herself: "Everybody should worship the sun! It makes people so cheerful and lively."

She moved slowly towards the old stairs, with their ends almost waxy and slippery. She had nothing else to do. There was a big, old crystal mirror standing in silence at the corner of the second floor. She wondered how old it could have been. It was fragile but had lived longer than many living things.

She looked at herself carefully. Purple halos circled her hazel eyes. Her long, auburn hair was hanging in two braids from both sides of her pale cheeks. The dark color of her dress made her look even paler. Everybody knew that mirrors were reality-tellers. The realities of Nahid's life were so awful that she thought she did not want to see them through the mirror. She came closer. Removed the dust from the surface with her elegant hands and at the very depth of her silent and gloomy eyes, she saw a fantastic dream: A pretty princess was laughing heavenly in the secure arms of her father. Waltzes were flying beyond the ancient walls of Vienna towards the boundless blue skies, and there, in that white and peaceful top of the sky, nobody was in the captivity of the walls of the sanitarium.

A leper? Not at all!

This edited version was first published on the Afghan journal CRITIQUE & VISION (issue 6: Autumn 1997). Permission for re-publication was granted by CRITIQUE & VISION.

About Fevziye Rahgozar Barlas

Fevziye Rahgozar Barlas was born in Balkh in 1955.  He father was the journalist, poet, and novelist, M. Shafee Rahgozar.  She completed her higher education in Istanbul, Turkey, on Turkish and English Literature.  In 1985 she worked at  Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich and became a member of the German Journalist Association.  Her books of  Persian poetry include, Wonderland and The Heavens are my Father.  Barlas’ writing career is divided among journalism, short story writing, and poetry.

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Donald Trump passed along sensitive intelligence to Russia’s ambassador, endangering American assets in the exact same way that Barack Obama did when he bowed to that guy. We’re convinced that at this point, Mitch McConnell’s entire family could be eaten by bears but so long as the plan to lower the effective tax rate for corporations were on track, he’d be cool.  And it seems like Trump’s week couldn’t get any worse unless he had a photo-op with an authoritarian ruler like Recep Tayyip Erdog — oh. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Tuesday, May 16th, 2017:

THIS MIGHT BE HOW THE DEMOCRATS BLOW 2018 - Greetings from Georgetown, where everyone knows the reason Trump won in November was because there weren’t enough Beltway gatherings at hotels where a side order of foie gras butter is a reasonable $15. As such, the Center for American Progress and practically the entire Democratic establishment thought it a good idea to to have an “Ideas Conference” at the Four Seasons today. Naturally, this had us wondering whether the setting might undermine the speakers’ messages of economic inclusion (”Concentrated money and concentrated power are corrupting our democracy,” warned Elizabeth Warren; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the economic woes of working people in California are “not much different from people in coal country;” “All we do is fight for working families in our country,” claimed Nancy Pelosi, adding that it was imperative that the Democratic Party better communicate its agenda to voters). “CAP’s Ideas Conference isn’t about the venue — it’s about the ideas and energy our speakers are bringing to the day,” said CAP spokeswoman Allison Preiss, who added that the venue was chosen to accommodate unexpected press interest (though the group’s 10th anniversary policy conference in 2013 was held, somewhat suspiciously, at the St. Regis). We asked Senator Jeff Merkley what he thought of the setting. “I did find it kind of ironic as I was walking here from the subway stop that we were moving into elite Georgetown for this conference,” he said. Merkley said he didn’t know enough about the planning to comment at length, but noted, approvingly, “this is a union shop.” Onward to 2018!

This is arguably the GOP’s worst news cycle of the year, and Republicans were giddy to tee off on the conference’s location: “Giving speeches to rich, white, elites inside $800 per night hotels in the toniest section of the most hated city in America only picks up where Hillary Clinton left off,” Ken Spain, the former communications director for the Republican National Campaign Committee, told us. Sam Geduldig, a leading GOP lobbyist and erstwhile aide to former House Speaker John Boehner, picked up on that theme. “I have this vision of wealthy liberals picking at a seafood tower while talking about people they know nothing about,” Geduldig said. “Maybe they can conduct a focus group of the hotel staff, while they have them in one place?”

Taking BernieLand’s temperature: “A tone-deaf luxury bootcamp for CAP-affiliated consultants, operatives, and big money donors accustomed to losing elections means the Democratic party might not get in shape ahead of the 2018 midterm elections,” People for Bernie co-founder Winnie Wong told us.

TRUMP ADMIN STILL DANCING AROUND INTEL LEAK DENIAL - Marina Fang: “President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday continued to provide a muddled explanation of reports that the president shared classified information with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting last week. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, who had said on Monday that The Washington Post’s reporting was false, would not directly confirm or deny that Trump had shared classified information. ‘We don’t say what’s classified, what’s not classified,’ McMaster said at a press briefing Tuesday, before adding that ‘what the president shared was wholly appropriate.’ Trump all but confirmed that he shared classified information in a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, proclaiming that he has ‘the absolute right’ to share any information he wants.” [HuffPost]

Oh: “McMaster’s pushback came just hours after Trump himself acknowledged Tuesday morning in a pair of tweets that he had indeed revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of the Washington Post story and a move that seemed to contradict his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.” [WaPo’s Ashley Parker]

DONALD TRUMP GAVE SENSITIVE INTEL TO THE RUSSIANS AND THE GOP IS ON IT - And by “on it,” we mean, “has the same canned response queued up.” Amanda Terkel: “Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) said the news was ‘deeply concerning,’ and he will raise it when the House Intelligence Committee meets. ‘I would be concerned anytime we’re discussing sensitive subjects with the Russians,’ said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) similarly said the revelations were ‘deeply disturbing,’ while Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told the White House to get its act together: ‘The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order. It’s got to happen.’ House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he wants a ‘full explanation’ from the administration of what Trump disclosed, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would simply like ‘a little less drama from the White House on a lot of things so that we can focus on our agenda.’” [HuffPost]

Haircuts: Jeffrey Young (h/t Jeffrey Young), Canada’s own Todd Zwillich (h/t Tiger Beat).

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OH GOOD LORD, TRUMP MEETS WITH ERDOGAN - The whole Russian intel leak thing reminded us that Trump will also likely meet with Rodrigo Duterte at some point this year. Can’t wait! Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Mark Landler: “President Trump on Tuesday praised President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey as a stalwart ally in the battle against Islamic extremism, ignoring Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown on his own people and brushing aside recent tensions between the United States and Turkey over how to wage the military campaign against the Islamic State. Welcoming Mr. Erdogan to the White House, Mr. Trump said, ‘Today, we face a new enemy in the fight against terrorism, and again we seek to face this threat together.’ … Mr. Erdogan praised Mr. Trump for the ‘legendary triumph’ he had achieved in the election and declared that his first meeting with the new president would be a ‘historical turn of tide’ in the Turkish-American relationship.” [NYT]

Congratulations to Jared Kushner: “Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) took himself out of the running to be the nation’s next FBI director, informing President Donald Trump’s administration that he intends to stay in the Senate instead. In a statement released by his office on Tuesday, Cornyn, the Senate’s majority whip, said the country needs a ‘well-credentialed’ and ‘independent’ FBI director to replace James Comey, who was fired by the president last week.” [HuffPost’s Igor Bobic]

THE 11-DIMENSIONAL CHESS OF FAKE NEWS - True Detective Season 13: The first one starring Tim Allen and Kelsey Grammar and streamed on NewsmaxTV. Alex Seitz-Wald: “The Dallas-based financial adviser, Ed Butowsky, a Fox News contributor who has written articles for Breitbart News, contacted the parents of Seth Rich and urged them to hire a private investigator to look into the death of their 27-year-old son, who was shot and killed last July in what police say was a robbery gone wrong. The Rich family hired the detective who had been recommended, Rod Wheeler, a former D.C. homicide detective who is also a Fox News contributor and who last month tweeted a photo of himself at the White House captioned, ‘Doing my part to Make America Great Again!!’ Wheeler said on Monday there was evidence to support the conspiracy theories, including that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks before his death — prompting a quick rebuke from both the police and Rich’s family…. Police say it was a robbery gone wrong, but the death quickly became a fascination of conspiracy theorists, who alleged he was the source of DNC emails published on Wikileaks, even though U.S. intelligence agencies say they actually came from a Russian hacking operation.” [MSNBC]

Condolences to Melissa McCarthy: “As President Donald Trump is reportedly frustrated with his communications team and mulling a major staff shake-up, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle signaled Tuesday that she could be leaving the president’s favorite channel for the White House. In an interview with the Bay Area News Group, Guilfoyle said she had been in conversations with the Trump administration about becoming White House press secretary or taking on another press role.” [HuffPost’s Michael Calderone]

NC GOV PROMISES EXECUTIVE ORDER ON HB2 - Pretty amazing considering the state legislature stripped Roy Cooper of pretty much every power save for the approval vanity plates. Julia Craven: “North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vowed Tuesday to issue an executive order ‘pretty soon’ to increase protections for LGBTQ people in the state. The pledge follows the state’s partial repeal of HB2, a law barring local governments from passing any anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay and transgender people. ‘I’m going to issue an executive order pretty soon that is comprehensive, that helps with LGBT protections and we’re going to keep working every day,’ he said during the Center for American Progress’ Ideas Conference. Cooper’s office told HuffPost they could not immediately give additional details about the order.” [HuffPost]

MAN ARRESTED FOR THREATENING CONGRESSWOMAN - McSally, to refresh your memory, represents Gabby Giffords old district. Curt Prendergast: “The FBI arrested a TUSD employee on suspicion of threatening U.S. Rep. Martha McSally. FBI agents arrested Steve Martan, 58, in connection with three messages left on the congressional office voicemail on May 2 and May 10, according to a criminal complaint filed May 12 in U.S. District Court in Tucson. Martan is a campus monitor at Miles Exploratory Learning Center in the Tucson Unified School District. He was placed on home assignment and told not to come into work as the district investigates the allegations. The voicemails contained threats to McSally, including that she should ‘be careful’ when she returns to Tucson and that her days ‘were numbered.’ He threatened to shoot her in one of the expletive-filled messages.” [Arizona Daily Star]

BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Here is the flyest toddler to ever take to a moonbounce.

COMFORT FOOD

The dopest of elevators.

How to make the carbonara from “Master of None.”

Take a break from this nightmarish newscycle and relax by watching some Japanese joinery.

TWITTERAMA

Thoughts and prayers to all those GOP lawmakers concerned about Trump’s behavior

— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) May 16, 2017

White House reaction cycle 1 - It never happened 2 - POTUS tweet 3 - It happened; NBD 4 - Nobody cares but you 5 - No more questions on this

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) May 16, 2017

Regular reminder that the entire election turned on fake anger that Clinton had mishandled unmarked material at low-level classification.

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) May 15, 2017

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#JusticeforVIXX

First of all~ I’m sorry I’ve been so dead orz.. but I’m back! So there has been a recent controversy with a certain Turkish contestant on Turkey’s Version of “The Voice” claiming that he wrote the lyrics and composed the song. But this became problematic due to the background music for his song turned out to be Dynamite by VIXX. 

*Note: Throughout this post VIXX’s fans are often referred to as STARLIGHTs*

On this screencap it says "lyrics-composition: kadir aktürk" that's his real name.

(Trans Cr./ Pic Cr. @/mavikartozu on Twitter)

 Video posted by @/vixxsaranghaeyo on Twitter due to video being removed on Youtube: https://twitter.com/vixxsaranghaeyo/status/822553418350886912

The problem is that this “artist” has claimed that this is his original song and has refused to give VIXX the credit to their song upon request of Starlights.

This contestant posted the following message when Starlights asked for feedback: “This isn’t stealing, this is creativity.” (Trans Cr. to the owner) 

Now you’re all probably wondering why I covered his name right? Well~ this person is trying to get verified on Twitter due to this backlash so he’s basically trying to get famous off of this event and we don’t want to give him this kind of satisfaction am I right? 

What most Starlights are angry is about is the fact that this specific contestant is being so antagonistic, hateful, making fun of the Korean language and also discriminatory towards VIXX’s fans. Such examples can be by bringing religion into his tweets where it was not necessary or relavant to the topic at hand, accusing Turkish K-Pop fans of being traitors to their culture and country. See ScreenCaps below.

Here is a message from VIXX TURKEY (@VixxFacts_TR):

“Hello, we are representatives of VIXX TURKEY - 빅스 터키 and VIXX FACTS TURKEY. We are writing this to clear up all misunderstandings and answer all accusations regarding STARLIGHT and all other fandoms. On Friday, January 20th 2017, a contestant named 'Kurşun' on the show "The Voice Turkey" used VIXX's song Dynamite's instrumental version for his performance and claimed that it's his own composition. Turkish fandoms and Turkish Starlights who noticed this, demanded him to apologize to all fans and VIXX. However, the person named Kurşun made hurtful comments against Turkish fans and called us "people who work against Turkey" (people who act against their own country's interest) and accused us of not taking pride in our OWN COUNTRY. In order to cover up his own mistake, he criticised our freedom of listening to the music we like and said we do not act like "TURKS".On top of that, he defended his theft by saying it is "a work of creativity".These unbelievable accusations have not only hurt our national pride, but also changed the entire situation into one where we are now also asking him to apologize for hurting Turkish Fandoms' national pride by using those ugly words.Our goal is to bring attention to how there can be a such a disrespectful and immoral 'musician' in our music industry and in our competition shows and to make a change through this movement.We have partially achieved that goal.However, the contestant still hasn't stopped attacking us both politically as well as in terms of religion. By continuing to accuse us, he is trying to get more attention and become famous.He is continuing to make fun of VIXX and ridicule their fans by posting nasty messages on his various SNS pages...etc. (Link: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spi7du)

“May Allah guide you as well ... sooner or later you will meet God's justice!” 

“I wish you will deal with slander and shitstorm, prostrate yourself to Allah and ask forgiveness for your horny and heresy?”

*Trans may not be accurate for the last 2 screenshots due to use of Google Translate*

A fellow STARLIGHT has reached out to Kursun and his team on Facebook only to be treated without the respect they deserve. (Cr. Prince Han and RoseLeo on Facebook’s VIXX- Starlight page)

This contestant has made irrelevant points to the Starlight and later taking back his “apology”

Link: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1176268795827343&id=466714036782826 

The contestant did make a post three weeks ago on his Facebook account. However, fans noticed right away that the post was in fact edited recently to give credit to VIXX and the post originally uploaded on December 28th did not have the caption.

This topic has trended #4 worldwide on Inauguration Day as well as in other countries therefore making this a topic that is worth pursuing. 

What can you as a fellow kpop stan do? Simple~ 

Please bring attention to the issue by tweeting the Voice Turkey at @osesturkiye, the contestants mentor @acunilicali and the channel @Acuncom on Twitter. Also, by using this hashtag  #KursunOSestenDiskalifiyeEdilsin on Twitter. The hashtag means "Kursun should be disqualified from the voice" (Cr. @/rabeannie1993)

Also, sign the petition to get the Judges’ attention to disqualify Kursun from the competition! https://www.change.org/p/acun-il%C4%B1cal%C4%B1-emek-h%C4%B1rs%C4%B1zl%C4%B1%C4%9F%C4%B1-yapan-o-ses-t%C3%BCrkiye-yar%C4%B1%C5%9Fmac%C4%B1s%C4%B1-kur%C5%9Fun-diskalifiye-olsun?utm_medium=whatsapp&utm_source=share_petition&recruiter=661893857

Five Ghanaians you must watch in 2020/21

[caption id="attachment_841401" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Thomas Partey[/caption] Despite the continent being rocked by coronavirus the European football season is about to get underway. Whilst most of the games will be played behind closed doors, that does mean access to televised and streamed events should be easier than ever before. With that in mind, we've picked out five Ghanaians you must watch in 2020/21. Number 5. Patrick Twumasi Twumasi has been somewhat of a journeyman since leaving RB Ghana back in 2012 with his career taking him to five different countries already. The latest spell was a loan move at Turkish Super Lig club Gaziantep where he joined fellow Ghanaians Chibsah Raman and Tetteh Abdul-Aziz. Even though it’s not a very mainstream league, Twumasi had quite the impact there too with an impressive goal involvement every 141 minutes, which was made up of six goals and five assists across 26 appearances. It means he was their second most influential attacking talent behind Nigerian striker Kayode Olarenwaju. Meanwhile, back in Spain, his parent club - Alaves - narrowly escaped relegation with one of the league’s most toothless attacks. Transfer rumours over a move to Bundesliga 2 outfit Hannover 96 have been circulating. A move there wouldn't be disastrous with the club expected to compete for promotion to the top tier but Alaves could surely do a lot worse.   Number 4. Kwadwo Asamoah 31-year-old Asamoah has endured a tough year with Inter. The team have impressed under the tutelage of Antonio Conte but winger come wing back Asamoah has only managed 11 appearances. He still has 12 months to run on his contract that was penned back in 2018 when he moved from Juventus but everything points to him moving on this window. That's exactly why he's one of our five Ghanaians you must watch in 2020/21. Last season, Asamoah made 42 appearances with most of them starts. He boasted a passing accuracy of 89% in Serie A with 32 of them defined as key passes i.e. those that create a scoring opportunity. On top of that he completed 62% of his attempted dribbles. I guess what I'm getting at is that he's far from past it with his style simply not what Conte is after. Thankfully, it looks like there will be takers for his signature. A move to Marseille has been muted along with interest from Serie B Champions Benevento. Let's look forward to Asamoah impressing us some more in the twilight of his career. Number 3. Mohammed Kudus 20-year-old Kudus has earned himself a move to a more prominent European club this season having transferred from Danish outfit Nordsjaelland to Dutch giants Ajax for a fee of £8m. It's early days but he's impressed in pre-season fixtures. Given the club have lost Hakim Ziyech already with David Neres tipped to follow there will be room for a creative influence. Kudus managed a goal involvement every 167 minutes last season with 11 goals and a solitary assist from 22 starts and three sub appearances so it's extremely plausible that coach Erik ten Hag picks him in his first team squad from the off. The attacking midfielder was rumoured to have been interesting Everton but a step to the Eredivise feels like a better move for his long term development and, if he excels at the Johan Cruyff Arena then a move to one of Europe’s top five leagues will come in time. Number 2. Mohammed Salisu Salisu serves as an example to everyone. His first taste of football was with Kusami Barcelona Babies side before moving on to join the African Talent Academy. It was there where he was spotted and jumped to Europe with Real Valladolid. On his arrival in Spain, he was only 18-years-old and had to make do with youth and reserve football for a while before making his first senior appearances in last year’s Copa Del Rey - Spain's domestic cup competition. 180 minutes across the two-legged tie with Getafe proved his only game time but 2019/20 was very different. Salisu started the season at centre back and remained a near constant in the team that finished 13th. He impressed at the heart of defence winning 61% of headers and 76% of tackles. It earned him attention from bigger clubs. Manchester United were linked but it was another Premier League team that landed his signature. He'll be pulling on the red and white stripes of Southampton in the new season. He'll be a huge success too. Number 1. Thomas Partey First things first, who knows where Partey will be playing his football in a few weeks time? Not me. I also happen to know, he'll be oozing quality wherever he ends up. The machine-like midfielder is currently under contract with Atletico Madrid but Arsenal are known to rank Partey as their number one transfer target. Presently, a fee hasn't been agreed and the managerial changes at Juventus has seen Andrea Pirlo linked with the 26 cap powerhouse - it's not yet clear how serious that interest is. One person who hopes he stays with Atletico is CK Akonnor. The reason? Champions League football and an almost guaranteed starting position. Partey made 46 appearances for Diego Simeone's men last year netting four goals and grabbing a solitary assist. It's not his final third contribution that makes him a top player though with his engine, tenacity and general reading of the game his real qualities. You can see why the Gunners want him and why they are favorites to sign him on all the best apps for betting. He ticks every box of what they've been missing in their midfield since the likes of Patrick Viera and Gilberto Silva. He's good enough to transform that team. Please let us see it happen. There you have it, five Ghanaians you must watch in 2020/21.   source: https://ghanasoccernet.com/

Afshin Ismaeli - (Ismaeli 2020)

Visual:

-          Focus- The whole image is in focus, this is because the more than just the subject face is needed to convey the story behind the picture, i.e. the large gun slung over the lady’s shoulder says that she is a fighter of some description, if this wasn’t in focus the idea would still be conveyed but just not as clearly and the gun would not carry the same importance.

-          Light- The light in the image appears to be artificial, it also looks to be quite harsh and falls directly on the subject lighting up her face which happens to be the brightest part of the picture drawing the eye to it, due to the harsh, direct nature of the light and the sharp fall-off from the lightest point of the image to the darkest and the slight vignette effect, I would make the assumption that the photo was taken using some sort of a flash, I do not know the reason for the use of a flash but I’d imagine that it was due to a lack of light in the room, this gives the image a rather candid appearance as if little planning was put into it.

-          Line- The most dominant line is a straight line formed by the machine gun that the woman has slung over her shoulder, this runs from the bottom centre of the photo and leads up to the subjects face, it works to some degree as a leading line, however it needn’t do as the subject’s face is the lightest part of the image and so the eye is most likely already drawn to it anyways as the main focal point of a portrait.

-          Repetition- The bullets in ammunition belt that is wrapped around the machine gun and draped over the subject’s right arm, the tassels on the curtain behind the subject and the pattern on the curtain itself are all forms of repetition, these items of repetition create a few different points of interest in the photo.

-          Form- The subject has had her 3-dimensionality more or less removed by the use of the flash light as the lighting on her is quite flat and consistent, which has removed much of the shading and depth the image would otherwise have had.

-          Space- Due the use of a flash and the closeness of the subject to the planar background, the photo lacks depth making it feel quite shallow, in combination with this the image consists of a large amount of negative space surrounding the subject, both of these elements give her singularity and individuality, meaning the story conveyed by the picture is about her and only her.

-          Texture- Most of the textures in the image are those of fabrics so would be relatively soft and pliable, these textures then have the smooth, cold, metallic qualities of the machine gun and its ammunition juxtaposed overtop, this contrast creates a sense of the gun being out of place along with the military uniform underneath the subjects cardigan.

-          Tone- Due to the use of a flash in the image the tonal range in the photo is very deep with the subject’s face being well lit and consisting of the lightest tones in the picture, and then these tones fall sharply away to the darkest tones around the bottom of the image in a sort of vignette effect, this sharp fall of in the tones creates a strange contrast between the top and bottom of the photo which works effectually in highlighting the woman’s face which is the most important element of the any portrait, as it tells, in most cases, the story.

-          Colour- Colour plays a strong part in this image with most of the palette consisting of dark warm colours such as burgundy in the subjects cardigan and violet in the curtains which are analogous, these colours are contrasted with those of the woman’s dark green and brown uniform and the black steeliness of the machine gun, this colour contrast aids in enforcing the idea that the gun and uniform are out of place in this scene as the cardigan looks like something that would be worn at home and the curtains look like those you might find in a home, I believe the purpose of this juxtaposition is to show that the lady is not of a fighting background but has joined the fight for the love her country, as have many women that are part of the Women’s Protection Units as is the lady in the picture, the pictures caption states ‘Portrait of a female fighter member of Units of protection of women’.

-          Composition- Compositionally the picture is relatively casual with the subject standing off-centre but not following the rule of thirds this plays into the slightly candid nature of the image, the viewpoint used is a slight low-angle which creates an interesting power-dynamic between the subject and the camera/ viewer, the power-dynamic also creates a strange sense of tension, this would not have been achieved if an eye-level straight-on point of view had have been used, a crop has been applied to the image also which was most likely done to remove some of the background as there was probably too much or there was an item that would have distracted the eye of the viewer and it may have removed some of the singularity from the subject if not cropped out.

 Technical:

-          Lighting- The lighting used in the image I believe is additional, a flash, however it may be a combination with the flash simply making up for the strength of the available lighting.

-          Aperture- By the looks of the photo a wider angle lens was used to capture the photo so the whole subject could be captured at a short range, with a medium f-stop value (f/ 6.3-9) allowing for the deep DOF and the whole image to be in focus from fore-ground, the tip of the gun barrel, to the background, the curtain.

-          Shutter speed- The shutter-speed needed to capture a portrait is not usually that long assuming the subject is not moving and the lighting is not too harsh and bright, together with this the fact a flash was most likely used means the shutter speed would have been restricted by flash sync speeds so the it would have been around 1/100-1/250s.

-          ISO- There is no visible noise or grain in the image and because a flash was likely used the ISO would have been set around 50-100 as these are the lowest value of many cameras.

-          White balance- The white balance looks to be neutral and very accurate to I imagine what would have been in front of the camera when the photo was taken.

Context- The photo was taken in Rojava, Syria of a lady who is part of YPJ and who fought against Turkish backed militias and jihadists (Ismaeli 2020), hence the machinegun and uniform. The curtain in the background is an interesting element in the photo as it is not what you would expect to find behind a ‘light machine gun’ bearing woman, my deduction of this strange setting is that, as aforesaid, they look like those you might find in a home, and this juxtaposition of the gun and uniform against them, is to show that the lady is not from a fighting background but has joined the fight for the love her country, as have many women that are part of the Women’s Protection Units. This is quite possible for the fact that many members of the YPJ are volunteer members with over 7000 fighters being volunteers as of late 2014. The photo was most likely taken with intent of being shown alongside a story to show the face behind it as documentation – documentary style photograph – this is the images Kaupapa (purpose). Afshim Ismaeli is a photojournalist, war photographer and researcher for the Norwegian Aftenposten newspaper (Xposure n.d.). In 2005 he started as a photojournalist on the Iraq conflict and since then has covered many other conflicts throughout the middle east. This photo from Syria was taken in recent years for one of his many photographic essays. When I look at the image, I get a feeling of respect for the lady and what she does in general but also for her country, I also feel slightly intimidated by her with the combination of the machine gun, her stance and the camera angle causing this.

Concepts- This photo is among many of Ismaeli’s that follow the similar setup of an individual slightly posed against a background where they are the only real point of interest in the photo. This technique really captures the emotion of the individual and helps to isolate them as the ‘story-teller’ in the photo. The picture helps to convey the subject’s story when paired with a caption, it gives a visual representation and face to the story, in telling a story it also helps to tell a story of war and conflict in Syria. This photo will possibly help me to add meaning and story to my photos through the use of formal techniques, such as the use of isolation to create individuality. I learnt that the reason, in a portrait that the face/ eyes are the most integral part of a portrait and the reason they’re focused on is because ‘they tell us so much about our subject’ (42 West 2013). I learnt in analysing this photo also why a portrait photo might be all in focus rather than the focus being mainly on the face/ eyes and this is to tell more of a story than what the eyes can tell.

Forensic Architecture redeploys surveillance-state tech to combat state-sponsored violence

The specter of constant surveillance hangs over all of us in ways we don’t even fully understand, but it is also possible to turn the tools of the watchers against them. Forensic Architecture is exhibiting several long-term projects at the Museum of Art and Design in Miami that use the omnipresence of technology as a way to expose crimes and violence by oppressive states.

Over seven years Eyal Weizman and his team have performed dozens of investigations into instances of state-sponsored violence, from drone strikes to police brutality. Often these events are minimized at all levels by the state actors involved, denied or no-commented until the media cycle moves on. But sometimes technology provides ways to prove a crime was committed and occasionally even cause the perpetrator to admit it — hoisted by their own electronic petard.

Sometimes this is actual state-deployed kit, like body cameras or public records, but it also uses private information co-opted by state authorities to track individuals, like digital metadata from messages and location services.

For instance, when Chicago police shot and killed Harith Augustus in 2018, the department released some footage of the incident, saying that it “speaks for itself.” But Forensic Architecture’s close inspection of the body cam footage and cross reference with other materials makes it obvious that the police violated numerous rules (including in the operation of the body cams) in their interaction with him, escalating the situation and ultimately killing a man who by all indications — except the official account — was attempting to comply. It also helped additional footage see the light which was either mistakenly or deliberately left out of a FOIA release.

In another situation, a trio of Turkish migrants seeking asylum in Greece were shown, by analysis of their WhatsApp messages, images and location and time stamps, to have entered Greece and been detained by Greek authorities before being “pushed back” by unidentified masked escorts, having been afforded no legal recourse to asylum processes or the like. This is one example of several recently that appear to be private actors working in concert with the state to deprive people of their rights.

Situated testimony for survivors

I spoke with Weizman before the opening of this exhibition in Miami, where some of the latest investigations are being shown off. (Shortly after our interview he would be denied entry to the U.S. to attend the opening, with a border agent explaining that this denial was algorithmically determined; we’ll come back to this.)

The original motive for creating Forensic Architecture, he explained, was to elicit testimony from those who had experienced state violence.

“We started using this technique when in 2013 we met a drone survivor, a German woman who had survived a drone strike in Pakistan that killed several relatives of hers,” Weizman explained. “She has wanted to deliver testimony in a trial regarding the drone strike, but like many survivors her memory was affected by the trauma she has experienced. The memory of the event was scattered, it had lacunae and repetitions, as you often have with trauma. And her condition is like many who have to speak out in human rights work: The closer you get to the core of the testimony, the description of the event itself, the more it escapes you.”

The approach they took to help this woman, and later many others, jog her own memory, was something called “situated testimony.” Essentially it amounts to exposing the person to media from the experience, allowing them to “situate” themselves in that moment. This is not without its own risks.

“Of course you must have the appropriate trauma professionals present,” Weizman said. “We only bring people who are willing to participate and perform the experience of being again at the scene as it happened. Sometimes details that would not occur to someone to be important come out.”

A digital reconstruction of a drone strike’s explosion was recreated physically for another exhibition.

But it’s surprising how effective it can be, he explained. One case exposed American involvement hitherto undisclosed.

“We were researching a Cameroon special forces detention center, torture and death in custody occurred, for Amnesty International,” he explained. “We asked detainees to describe to us simply what was outside the window. How many trees, or what else they could see.” Such testimony could help place their exact location and orientation in the building and lead to more evidence, such as cameras across the street facing that room.

“And sitting in a room based on a satellite image of the area, one told us: ‘yes, there were two trees, and one was over by the fence where the American soldiers were jogging.’ We said, ‘wait, what, can you repeat that?’ They had been interviewed many times and never mentioned American soldiers,” Weizman recalled. “When we heard there were American personnel, we found Facebook posts from service personnel who were there, and were able to force the transfer of prisoners there to another prison.”

Weizman noted that the organization only goes where help is requested, and does not pursue what might be called private injustices, as opposed to public.

“We require an invitation, to be invited into this by communities that invite state violence. We’re not a forensic agency, we’re a counter-forensic agency. We only investigate crimes by state authorities.”

Using virtual reality: “Unparalleled. It’s almost tactile.”

In the latest of these investigations, being exhibited for the first time at MOAD, the team used virtual reality for the first time in their situated testimony work. While VR has proven to be somewhat less compelling than most would like on the entertainment front, it turns out to work quite well in this context.

“We worked with an Israeli whistleblower soldier regarding testimony of violence he committed against Palestinians,” Weizman said. “It has been denied by the Israeli prime minister and others, but we have been able to find Palestinian witnesses to that case, and put them in VR so we could cross reference them. We had victim and perpetrator testifying to the same crime in the same space, and their testimonies can be overlaid on each other.”

Dean Issacharoff — the soldier accused by Israel of giving false testimony — describes the moment he illegally beat a Palestinian civilian. (Caption and image courtesy of Forensic Architecture)

One thing about VR is that the sense of space is very real; if the environment is built accurately, things like sight-lines and positional audio can be extremely true to life. If someone says they saw the event occur here, but the state says it was here, and a camera this far away saw it at this angle… these incomplete accounts can be added together to form something more factual, and assembled into a virtual environment.

“That project is the first use of VR interviews we have done — it’s still in a very experimental stage. But it didn’t involve fatalities, so the level of trauma was a bit more controlled,” Weizman explained. “We have learned that the level and precision we can arrive at in reconstructing an incident is unparalleled. It’s almost tactile; you can walk through the space, you can see every object: guns, cars, civilians. And you can populate it until the witness is satisfied that this is what they experienced. I think this is a first, definitely in forensic terms, as far as uses of VR.”

A photogrammetry-based reconstruction of the area of Hebron where the incident took place.

In video of the situated testimony, you can see witnesses describing locations more exactly than they likely or even possibly could have without the virtual reconstruction. “I stood with the men at exactly that point,” says one, gesturing toward an object he recognized, then pointing upwards: “There were soldiers on the roof of this building, where the writing is.”

Of course it is not the digital recreation itself that forces the hand of those involved, but the incontrovertible facts it exposes. No one would ever have known that the U.S. had a presence at that detainment facility, and the country had no reason to say it did. The testimony wouldn’t even have been enough, except that it put the investigators onto a line of inquiry that produced data. And in the case of the Israeli whistleblower, the situated testimony defies official accounts that the organization he represented had lied about the incident.

Avoiding “product placement” and tech incursion

Sophie Landres, MOAD’s curator of Public Programs and Education, was eager to add that the museum is not hosting this exhibit as a way to highlight how wonderful technology is. It’s important to put the technology and its uses in context rather than try to dazzle people with its capabilities. You may find yourself playing into someone else’s agenda that way.

“For museum audiences, this might be one of their first encounters with VR deployed in this way. The companies that manufacture these technologies know that people will have their first experiences with this tech in a cultural or entertainment contrast, and they’re looking for us to put a friendly face on these technologies that have been created to enable war and surveillance capitalism,” she told me. “But we’re not interested in having our museum be a showcase for product placement without having a serious conversation about it. It’s a place where artists embrace new technologies, but also where they can turn it towards existing power structures.”

Boots on backs mean this not an advertisement for VR headsets or 3D modeling tools.

She cited a tongue-in-cheek definition of “mixed reality” referring to both digital crossover into the real world and the deliberate obfuscation of the truth at a greater scale.

“On the one hand you have mixing the digital world and the real, and on the other you have the mixed reality of the media environment, where there’s no agreement on reality and all these misinformation campaigns. What’s important about Forensic Architecture is they’re not just presenting evidence of the facts, but also the process used to arrive at these truth claims, and that’s extremely important.”

In openly presenting the means as well as the ends, Weizman and his team avoid succumbing to what he calls the “dark epistemology” of the present post-truth era.

“The arbitrary logic of the border”

As mentioned earlier, Weizman was denied entry to the U.S. for reasons unknown, but possibly related to the network of politically active people with whom he has associated for the sake of his work. Disturbingly, his wife and children were also stopped while entering the states a day before him and separated at the airport for questioning.

In a statement issued publicly afterwards, Weizman dissected the event.

In my interview the officer informed me that my authorization to travel had been revoked because the “algorithm” had identified a security threat. He said he did not know what had triggered the algorithm but suggested that it could be something I was involved in, people I am or was in contact with, places to which I had traveled… I was asked to supply the Embassy with additional information, including fifteen years of travel history, in particular where I had gone and who had paid for it. The officer said that Homeland Security’s investigators could assess my case more promptly if I supplied the names of anyone in my network whom I believed might have triggered the algorithm. I declined to provide this information.

This much we know: we are being electronically monitored for a set of connections – the network of associations, people, places, calls, and transactions – that make up our lives. Such network analysis poses many problems, some of which are well known. Working in human rights means being in contact with vulnerable communities, activists and experts, and being entrusted with sensitive information. These networks are the lifeline of any investigative work. I am alarmed that relations among our colleagues, stakeholders, and staff are being targeted by the US government as security threats.

This incident exemplifies – albeit in a far less intense manner and at a much less drastic scale – critical aspects of the “arbitrary logic of the border” that our exhibition seeks to expose. The racialized violations of the rights of migrants at the US southern border are of course much more serious and brutal than the procedural difficulties a UK national may experience, and these migrants have very limited avenues for accountability when contesting the violence of the US border.

The works being exhibited, he said, “seek to demonstrate that we can invert the forensic gaze and turn it against the actors — police, militaries, secret services, border agencies — that usually seek to monopolize information. But in employing the counter-forensic gaze one is also exposed to higher-level monitoring by the very state agencies investigated.”

Forensic Architecture’s investigations are ongoing; you can keep up with them at the organization’s website. And if you’re in Miami, drop by MOAD to see some of the work firsthand.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2PlmEDy via IFTTT

The specter of constant surveillance hangs over all of us in ways we don’t even fully understand, but it is also possible to turn the tools of the watchers against them. Forensic Architecture is exhibiting several long-term projects at the Museum of Art and Design in Miami that use the omnipresence of technology as a way to expose crimes and violence by oppressive states.

Over seven years Eyal Weizman and his team have performed dozens of investigations into instances of state-sponsored violence, from drone strikes to police brutality. Often these events are minimized at all levels by the state actors involved, denied or no-commented until the media cycle moves on. But sometimes technology provides ways to prove a crime was committed and occasionally even cause the perpetrator to admit it — hoisted by their own electronic petard.

Sometimes this is actual state-deployed kit, like body cameras or public records, but it also uses private information co-opted by state authorities to track individuals, like digital metadata from messages and location services.

For instance, when Chicago police shot and killed Harith Augustus in 2018, the department released some footage of the incident, saying that it “speaks for itself.” But Forensic Architecture’s close inspection of the body cam footage and cross reference with other materials makes it obvious that the police violated numerous rules (including in the operation of the body cams) in their interaction with him, escalating the situation and ultimately killing a man who by all indications — except the official account — was attempting to comply. It also helped additional footage see the light which was either mistakenly or deliberately left out of a FOIA release.

In another situation, a trio of Turkish migrants seeking asylum in Greece were shown, by analysis of their WhatsApp messages, images, and location and time stamps, to have entered Greece and been detained by Greek authorities before being “pushed back” by unidentified masked escorts, having been afforded no legal recourse to asylum processes or the like. This is one example of several recently that appear to be private actors working in concert with the state to deprive people of their rights.

Situated testimony for survivors

I spoke with Weizman before the opening of this exhibition in Miami, where some of the latest investigations are being shown off. (Shortly after our interview he would be denied entry to the U.S. to attend the opening, with a border agent explaining that this denial was algorithmically determined; We’ll come back to this.)

The original motive for creating Forensic Architecture, he explained, was to elicit testimony from those who had experienced state violence.

“We started using this technique when in 2013 we met a drone survivor, a German woman who had survived a drone strike in Pakistan that killed several relatives of hers,” Weizman explained. “She has wanted to deliver testimony in a trial regarding the drone strike, but like many survivors her memory was affected by the trauma she has experienced. The memory of the event was scattered, it had lacunae and repetitions, as you often have with trauma. And her condition is like many who have to speak out in human rights work: The closer you get to the core of the testimony, the description of the event itself, the more it escapes you.”

The approach they took to help this woman, and later many others, jog her own memory, was something called “situated testimony.” Essentially it amounts to exposing the person to media from the experience, allowing them to “situate” themselves in that moment. This is not without its own risks.

“Of course you must have the appropriate trauma professionals present,” Weizman said. “We only bring people who are willing to participate and perform the experience of being again at the scene as it happened. Sometimes details that would not occur to someone to be important come out.”

A digital reconstruction of a drone strike’s explosion was recreated physically for another exhibition.

But it’s surprising how effective it can be, he explained. One case exposed American involvement hitherto undisclosed.

“We were researching a Cameroon special forces detention center, torture and death in custody occurred, for Amnesty International,” he explained. “We asked detainees to describe to us simply what was outside the window. How many trees, or what else they could see.” Such testimony could help place their exact location and orientation in the building and lead to more evidence, such as cameras across the street facing that room.

“And sitting in a room based on a satellite image of the area, one told us: ‘yes, there were two trees, and one was over by the fence where the American soldiers were jogging.’ We said, ‘wait, what, can you repeat that?’ They had been interviewed many times and never mentioned American soldiers,” Weizman recalled. “When we heard there were American personnel, we found Facebook posts from service personnel who were there, and were able to force the transfer of prisoners there to another prison.”

Weizman noted that the organization only goes where help is requested, and does not pursue what might be called private injustices, as opposed to public.

“We require an invitation, to be invited into this by communities that invite state violence. We’re not a forensic agency, we’re a counter-forensic agency. We only investigate crimes by state authorities.”

Using virtual reality: “Unparalleled. It’s almost tactile.”

In the latest of these investigations, being exhibited for the first time at MOAD, the team used virtual reality for the first time in their situated testimony work. While VR has proven to be somewhat less compelling than most would like on the entertainment front, it turns out to work quite well in this context.

“We worked with an Israeli whistleblower soldier regarding testimony of violence he committed against Palestinians,” Weizman said. “It has been denied by the Israeli prime minister and others, but we have been able to find Palestinian witnesses to that case, and put them in VR so we could cross reference them. we had victim and perpetrator testifying to the same crime in the same space, and their testimonies can be overlaid on each other.”

Dean Issacharoff – the soldier accused by Israel of giving false testimony – describes the moment he illegally beat a Palestinian civilian. (Caption and image courtesy of Forensic Architecture)

One thing about VR is that the sense of space is very real; If the environment is built accurately, things like sight-lines and positional audio can be extremely true to life. If someone says they saw the event occur here, but the state says it was here, and a camera this far away saw it at this angle… these incomplete accounts can be added together to form something more factual, and assembled into a virtual environment.

“That project is the first use of VR interviews we have done —  it’s still in a very experimental stage. But it didn’t involve fatalities, so the level of trauma was a bit more controlled,” Weizman explained. “We have learned that the level and precision we can arrive at in reconstructing and incident is unparalleled. It’s almost tactile; You can walk through the space, you can see every object: guns, cars, civilians. And you can populate it until the witness is satisfied that this is what they experienced. I think this is a first, definitely in forensic terms, as far as uses of VR.”

A photogrammetry-based reconstruction of the area of Hebron where the incident took place.

In video of the situated testimony, you can see witnesses describing locations more exactly than they likely or even possibly could have without the virtual reconstruction. “I stood with the men at exactly that point,” says one, gesturing towards an object he recognized, then pointing upwards: “There were soldiers on the roof of this building, where the writing is.”

Of course it is not the digital recreation itself that forces the hand of those involved, but the incontrovertible facts it exposes. No one would ever have know that the U.S. had a presence at that detainment facility, and the country had no reason to say it did. The testimony wouldn’t even have been enough, except that it put the investigators onto a line of inquiry that produced data. And in the case of the Israeli whistleblower, the situated testimony defies official accounts that the organization he represented had lied about the incident.

Avoiding “product placement” and tech incursion

Sophie Landres, MOAD’s Curator of Public Programs and Education, was eager to add that the museum is not hosting this exhibit as a way to highlight how wonderful technology is. It’s important to put the technology and its uses in context rather than try to dazzle people with its capabilities. You may find yourself playing into someone else’s agenda that way.

“For museum audiences, this might be one of their first encounters with VR deployed in this way. The companies that manufacture these technologies know that people will have their first experiences with this tech in a cultural or entertainment contrast, and they’re looking for us to put a friendly face on these technologies that have been created to enable war and surveillance capitalism,” she told me. “But we’re not interested in having our museum be a showcase for product placement without having a serious conversation about it. It’s a place where artists embrace new technologies, but also where they can turn it towards existing power structures.”

Boots on backs mean this not an advertisement for VR headsets or 3D modeling tools.

She cited a tongue-in-cheek definition of “mixed reality” referring to both digital crossover into the real world and the deliberate obfuscation of the truth at a greater scale.

“On the one hand you have mixing the digital world and the real, and on the other you have the mixed reality of the media environment, where there’s no agreement on reality and all these misinformation campaigns. What’s important about Forensic Architecture is they’re not just presenting evidence of the facts, but also the process used to arrive at these truth claims, and that’s extremely important.”

In openly presenting the means as well as the ends, Weizman and his team avoid succumbing to what he calls the “dark epistemology” of the present post-truth era.

“The arbitrary logic of the border”

As mentioned earlier, Weizman was denied entry to the U.S. for reasons unknown, but possibly related to the network of politically active people with whom he has associated for the sake of his work. Disturbingly, his wife and children were also stopped while entering the states a day before him and separated at the airport for questioning.

In a statement issued publicly afterwards, Weizman dissected the event.

In my interview the officer informed me that my authorization to travel had been revoked because the “algorithm” had identified a security threat. He said he did not know what had triggered the algorithm but suggested that it could be something I was involved in, people I am or was in contact with, places to which I had traveled… I was asked to supply the Embassy with additional information, including fifteen years of travel history, in particular where I had gone and who had paid for it. The officer said that Homeland Security’s investigators could assess my case more promptly if I supplied the names of anyone in my network whom I believed might have triggered the algorithm. I declined to provide this information.

This much we know: we are being electronically monitored for a set of connections – the network of associations, people, places, calls, and transactions – that make up our lives. Such network analysis poses many problems, some of which are well known. Working in human rights means being in contact with vulnerable communities, activists and experts, and being entrusted with sensitive information. These networks are the lifeline of any investigative work. I am alarmed that relations among our colleagues, stakeholders, and staff are being targeted by the US government as security threats.

This incident exemplifies – albeit in a far less intense manner and at a much less drastic scale – critical aspects of the “arbitrary logic of the border” that our exhibition seeks to expose. The racialized violations of the rights of migrants at the US southern border are of course much more serious and brutal than the procedural difficulties a UK national may experience, and these migrants have very limited avenues for accountability when contesting the violence of the US border.

The works being exhibited, he said, “seek to demonstrate that we can invert the forensic gaze and turn it against the actors—police, militaries, secret services, border agencies—that usually seek to monopolize information. But in employing the counter-forensic gaze one is also exposed to higher level monitoring by the very state agencies investigated.”

Forensic Architecture’s investigations are ongoing; you can keep up with them at the organization’s website. And if you’re in Miami, drop by MOAD to see some of the work firsthand.

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