You normally would not associate the purchase of tequila with the alleviation of ethnic cleansing and combating war crimes. In the case of Casamigos, that should be one of the intended effects. The new brand of tequila is described in a story found in mother nature news.

Profits from the Casamigos brand will fund the Satellite Sentinel Project which keeps an eye on the disputed territory between Sudan and the world’s newest country South Sudan. Perhaps George Clooney, who is behind both the Satellite Sentinel Project and the Casamigos brand, was inspired by the chant from Haxell Wexler’s Medium Cool, “the whole world is watching.”  The idea with SSP is “to hold perpetrators of alleged mass atrocities accountable by documenting human rights crimes as they develop and unfold.” Ideally, the violence is stopped because it is known to be immediately visible to the entire world.

The best description of the Satellite Sentinel Project can be found at its own web site.

Now that you know the benefits to non-combatants in this region of the world, are you more interested in trying this Jalisco product of the blue agave plant?

Janesville, Wisconsin was where I was born and grew up. I haven’t lived there for over thirty years. A recent trip there raised the question of, “What is home?”

Geese 1

It was already near the end of November but there were still geese who had not started their journey south. They have a winter home and a summer home.

Geese 2

Geese 3

The manufacturing institutions for which Janesville was noted are no more. Parker Pen was sold, moved, resold . . . the large manufacturing facility sits idle. The downtown office where a neighborhood friend’s father walked everyday to his job as chemist has another building in its place.

The General Motors Assembly Division plant is closed and the smaller businesses that used to support it have fallen on bad times as a result.

Beloit, a dozen miles downstream on the Rock River, has made art from the remnants of its former foundries and factories. The Beloit Riverwalk makes a showcase of these former industrial facilities.

Beloit Riverwalk 1

Beloit Riverwalk 2

Beloit Riverwalk 3

The building above never had a wall on this side as I recall. It was one of those places where the furnaces kept it hot even in the middle of a Wisconsin winter.

Interior Design

Beloit’s downtown looks surprising well kept. Making way for some new construction has exposed the interior decoration in this older building.

I found some memories but I did not find home on this trip to my home town. I am still working on the concept of what is home in a world of impermanence.

Anyone who loves words, whether poetry or prose, probably has a notebook or numerous scraps of paper with scribblings that make the start of a great essay or short story or poem. The oft repeated phrase, “Put on your own mask first and then assist others around you” is something I had been toying with for quite a while. It’s an obvious metaphor for having your own affairs in order before trying to help other people in the same situation. The metaphor extends to such wisdom as not being able to support peace if you are yourself not at peace. The phrase could also lead to some clever humour with references to Joseph Campbell.

Unhappily, I have lost the race to exploit this clever phrase. A quick search on Google turned up a number of similar prior uses. One of the most worthwhile was found on a YouTube video where David Lynch explained to a group at Maharishi University in 2007 that it was not selfish to first consider your own understanding and experience of compassion before you could bring compassion to your dealings with those around you. Here is the video at Vimeo;

http://vimeo.com/11190032

Maybe it’s not necessary to be the first with the turn of a clever phrase. I don’t think I could do better than David Lynch has done with this one. The “Put on your own mask first” page in my notebook can be discarded.

“In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.  A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things,” their totems.”
– – – Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Another striking Joan Didion quote I ran across just after the recently completed task of getting the Afghanistan 1975 photos posted here. So, how many of the photographs constitute creative expression and how many are an attempt to “capture the moment” and preserve it as a keepsake or totem? Do the photographs have a current purpose or do they only represent an attachment to things past? Which of the things of the past should be preserved and which are better discarded?

I am without answers on these questions but I think the issues raised in the Joan Didion quote are significant.

As Wikipedia reports,”The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, alienation effect, or distancing effect.”

Verfremdungseffekt is the word used by Bertholt Brecht to describe the intended audience effect of his plays. Rather than have the audience identify with the characters and immerse themselves in the action he worked to force the maintenance of some critical distance. He used techniques that forced the involvement of the intellect as well as the emotions.

I wonder if we could do a translation as detachment and make a connection with the Buddhist admonishment about attachment to things of this world. Brechtian theatre as Buddhist theatre? How very Zen.

If nothing else, it solves the semantic problem of the often used translation of alienation which caries with it a lot of negative ballast.

As expressed in my previous comments on photography, it is necessary to provide some distance (detachment) from the subject in the making of photographs. At the simplest level this is true because you are dealing only with the visual aspects of the subject. Subject becomes object as the visual is extracted for the photographic record.

It’s interesting that such a wide range of words get offered up as the equivalent of verfremdungseffekt. The next question that comes up is whether this element of art is requisite on the creative side. Is the artist necessarily alienated from the rest of society? Or is the artist gifted with the power of being able to create a distance from his subject matter that others cannot? All these profound questions emanate from a German word that has no precise equivalent in English.

“The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
Joan Didion, Blue Nights

This was shared on Facebook by Andrea Baker and it struck home quite sharply. I have always felt a disconnect between photographing something and participating in it. When I set out with a camera as a photographer it is necessary to shift into the role of outsider. Some distance is necessary to be able to extract an instant record from the moment. Photography is a strictly visual medium. The visual is emphasized to the exclusion or detriment of the other senses. This sensory isolation is also isolating the photographer from full participation in what is being photographed.

Am I off on a tangent of what Joan Didion was talking about? A Google search of other quotes from this book also seem very much on target regarding the nature of photography. I guess it’s time to see if I can get a copy of Blue Nights and explore further.