hong kong by ward roberts

What is at issue is how an image of Hong Kong’s architecture and urban space is used to support a narrative that implicity attributes the colony’s success to the smooth combination of British administration and Chinese entrepreneurship. Such a narrative also mobilizes ethnic and psychologistic assumptions that cannot bear scrutiny: the dogma that Hong Kong people are by nature hardworking, that they have a high tolerance for crowded living conditions by genetic design, that they will do anything for money. Peeping out from under this narrative is a master discourse that, seeing only its own mirror reflections, inscribes the primacy of the economic everywhere in the most literal-minded fashion. This is a discourse that elsewhere I have called decadent. This discourse manages to make a complex space disappear into a one-dimensional image, structured on a facile binarism. Such a binarism not only tends to domesticate differences and restabilize change; it also avoids the spatial issues, to give us only a copulation of clichés.

Ackbar Abbas

there was so much more to the trip than these photos show.

ps. i don’t think i updated about this, but ten minutes 31 has been up for a while now.

d. yee has this uncanny ability to depict the human condition, at once fragile and steadfast, through his cinematically influenced photography.

from the beautiful archives of mr. & mrs. mahler, founders of ostkreuz

sights and observations from the past month or so

collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. how many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches i undertook in pursuit of books! … now i am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. other thoughts fill me than the ones i am talking about — not thoughts but images, memories … for a collector — and i mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be — ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

walter benjamin

ask me how my year has been and i’ll tell you that i have grown up; i felt it as it was happening. i look out the window now at two in the morning and fall in love, time and time again, with the sky still glowing at this odd midnight hour. sometimes i relish staying up late for this reason alone. other times i stay up late because my thoughts and feelings are nocturnal, so i accompany them for a bit. i lay them to rest on a piece of paper, or otherwise write them on my hand if i want to wake up with them on my mind. usually they end up as blurry traces of words the next morning, like bruises of an unfamiliar hue. they shared the same canvas of skin with the big burn mark on my forearm. it hurt like none other when i got it and throughout all of winter i tried very hard to hide it away. now when the wind brushes against it i wonder, as i do with faded ink and the eternal blue hour sky, how a mere shade of colour can affect me in such palpable ways.

…

and so i leave with at least one muted scar, a thousand volatile musings, and a penchant for sapphire nights…

everything else i carry with me in my brimming heart.

]]> http://joannelam.com/hello/2010/06/14/hejda/feed/ 9 http://joannelam.com/hello/2010/06/05/we-got-by/ http://joannelam.com/hello/2010/06/05/we-got-by/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 10:29:58 +0000 jo& http://joannelam.com/hello/?p=1449

new edition of ten minutes is up, and a huge thanks to danica for featuring us on kitsune noir recently :)

just dropping in to say hi from barcelona! off to primavera sound festival tomorrow.

berlin