Ned&ShivaProductions

Once promoted as a resort on par with Palm Springs, the city today is surrounded by Martian-like mountains, rotten stench of hydrogen sulfide, thousands of dead fish and birds on the beach, and an unbearable heat above 100°F.

Today’s ruins of hotels, marinas, yacht clubs, and vast unfinished housing developments challenge ideas of modernization and unlimited progress of urban development.

Strewn alongside route 285 exist abandoned homes, empty buildings, and dilapidated refineries. The people in this vanished community whose lives and histories once thrived alongside economic prosperity have disappeared and what remain are ghosts. The question is, whose ghosts?

As national borders have become porous, the concept of covert operations within a nation has had an especially unpleasant side effect: paranoia.

This paranoia is a result of institutional fears that citizens would be targets of indiscriminate violence. Terror warfare is by nature unconventional and counter-insurgent. The search for invisible enemies remains as fresh as today’s newspaper.

The gaze characterizes and displays the relationships between subjects by looking. Sociologist Stuart Hall theorized about the sexualized nature of the look, “Looking always involves desire to see, to see what you can’t see, to see more than you can see… to see beyond.”

American Wedding, by Essex Hemphill (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/…). As sung by Justin Bond (http://justinbond.com/).

In the 1920’s, New York State had operated six mental hospitals to facilitate the growing need for psychiatric care, and all were extremely overcrowded. The state’s answer was to build the solution to this problem once and for all – Pilgrim State Hospital. Originally designed to house 12,500 patients on 1,900 acres of land, Pilgrim still holds the record of being the largest psychiatric hospital in the world.

The hospital is now closed and slated for demolition. Its abandoned and distressed interior cannot displace the forgotten stories and social impact for those whose lives were touched by disquietude and heartbreak.

American Gothic documents a travelogue through rural America about love and the struggle to maintain the American Dream. 

(Audio) “Post festum,” Theodor W. Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” Minima Moralia (1944-47). As read by Paul Chan via My Own Private Alexandria, National Philistine.

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American Gothic consists of a series of 25 individual prints—6 of which are presented here as lightboxes.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

—Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

An on-going study suggests that at certain moments, randomly emitted data shows structure when correlated with global events. It appears that the coherence and intensity of a common reaction creates a sustained pulse of order in the random flow of numbers. These patterns, where there should be none, look like reflections of our concentrated focus, as the riveting events drew us from our individual concerns and melded us into an extraordinary coherence.

The word ‘apocalypse’ originally indicated an ‘unveiling’, and the Book of Revelation not only documents the destruction of the current world, but also maps out the creation of a new, better one.

Our millennial angst is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety—a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and distrust fanned by media sensationalism (The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery).

In other words, uncontrollable emotion interjecting and receding in a visual wave.

I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
—Georges Duhamel, Scenes de la vie future. Paris, 1930, p. 52.

1999 marks the sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush, which brought vast changes to the Golden State. What began as a pristine western frontier of the United States became a destination—both real and imagined—for the entire nation and the world.

On February 27, 1993, under the suspicion that a religious group was stockpiling automatic weapons, government officials unsuccessfully raided the home of the Branch Davidians and began a 51-day standoff to negotiate their surrender.

In an empty field believers remain to carry on the legacy of their faith. Memory and expectation bind them intractably to those events and justify their very existence. Each individual’s perspectives are guided by principles they perceive to be true; yet, truth is as indistinguishable as belief.

Religion is like a pair of shoes… Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.
― George Carlin

As Michel Foucault described it from the inmate’s point of view, “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”

In today's era, filmmakers harness a plethora of cutting-edge filmmaking tools to elevate their storytelling. The abundance of digital devices has granted an unprecedented level of accessibility to the art of filmmaking, pushing the boundaries of creative expression like never before. However, amidst this innovative landscape, emerging tools pose a potential threat to the essence of individual creativity and production.

TO BE POSTED SHORTLY

In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.”

Thus spoke Bicycle Gang of Doom.

Critics’ reservations never deterred American singer Al Jarreau, who prided himself, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1986, on his “jazz attitude,” which he defined as “the idea of being open to each and every moment as a chance to create something different.”