Filtering by Tag: WAR
Unmanned Drone
Unmanned Drone by Kara Walker
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Books I Read: The Art of War
What I'm Listening to: Automatic's "mq9"
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LAPD Estate Sale
Estate sale of a Vietnam War vet and retired LAPD officer. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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What I'm (Re)Watching: "Apocalypse Now"
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Books I Read in 2024: End of Active Service
Have you read Eat the Apple? It’s a memoir by my friend Matt Young. It’s a wildly inventive memoir-ish recounting of his days as a Marine in the Iraq War. Now Matt has published a novel: End of Active Service. It’s an alarmingly intimate tour through the mind of a man who has returned from war—but the war rages on inside of him. It’s a really beautiful book about love, letting go, and starting over. I highly recommend it.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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Read This Book
My friend Matt Young's memoir, Eat the Apple, which has been called "the Iliad of the Iraq War," is on sale tomorrow. It's an amazing book that I was lucky enough to read while he was working on it. Today, the NYT proclaimed it "inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining," and NPR says it's "brilliant and barbed." I strongly recommend you read it. You will love it.
Buy a copy of my digital short story "The Tumor"! It's been called "a masterpiece."
Buy This Book
I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of my buddy Matt Young's EAT THE APPLE: A MEMOIR.
It just got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly!
"In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to 'the sandbox' in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up."
Boobs
Image via dafont
I went to a breast cancer support group last night. I've been cancer free for four years, but I felt like going back to a group. Sometimes I think the business of that still lingers, and I'm interested in getting rid of it. It was interesting. It makes you remember how it's so common, and everyone is different, and everyone is the same. It was raining outside. There were only six of us inside. In a way, it was a bit like a war veterans meeting: everyone with their missing pieces, and their invisible wounds, and their unloading of the past.
Get Em, Girl!
I came across this amazing photo by Ted Streshinsky for Corbis while doing some research.
Here's the caption:
1969: National guardsmen, called out by Governor Reagan to quell demonstrations, surround a Vietnam war protester during the People’s Park riot. The guardsmen herded protesters into a carpark with bayonets
Drinking Tea with the Taliban
Photo credit: Lynsey Addario
I read Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario's memoir, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, and liked it very much. Is it an extraordinary work of masterful nonfiction? No. Is it the riveting account of a woman who has bigger balls than you do? Yes. There may be too much love story in this war story for man readers, but ladies looking to live boldly in a world that isn't made of pixels will be inspired by Addario's fearless approach to love and war.
“Madam,” Haleem said, “the commander’s men are worried you can’t drink your tea through your veil. They would really like for you to drink your tea.” The whispers continued, and if it weren’t for the veil, I would have had a difficult time concealing my smile. Only among Muslims is the hospitality so great that they cannot bear the notion that someone’s tea will be left untouched.
Haleem had another brilliant idea: “I know! You can stand in the corner of the room, with your back facing all of us, and lift your veil to the wall and drink your tea. Once you finish, you can replace your veil.”
And so, in a room full of some of the most vicious fighters against the United States and everything it stood for, I stood in the corner and faced the wall as I drank my tea.
Speechless
A Veterans For Peace UK Film challenging the British Army's policy of recruiting 16 year olds into the most dangerous army jobs. More details at www.battlefieldcasualties.co.uk Director: Price James Writer: Darren Cullen Based on Original Artwork by Darren Cullen Featuring Matt Berry Executive Producer: Alex Chamberlain Producer: Micki Pearlman Director of Photography: John Miguel King Art Director/Model Maker: Jessica Ashman Art Director/Model Maker: Emma-Rose Dade Editor: Rob Simpkins Additional Editing: Amy Beton VFX and Graphics: Jae Ho Hwang VHS FX: Martin Fickling & River Stas Colour Grading: Ben Rogers at Gramercy Park Studios Kit Lawson: Senior Post producer at Gramercy Park Studios Additional VFX: Mark Beardall at Gramercy Park Studios Nuke Op: Kalle Kohlstrom Music Composer: Darren Cullen Sound Mixer: Tom Deane at Tom Deane Sound. VO Recordist: Zak Kurtha at Gramercy Park Studios Audio Assistant - Sam Cross at Gramercy Park Studios Additional Sound recording: Luke Atkinson Electric guitar: Price James Camera Assistant: Orlando Pedretti Camera Assistant: Melvyn Connell Production Assistant: Hayley Williams Runner: Christina Nesi Runner: Jess Simmonds Casting: Kristie Sicolo @ Quirky Kidz Management PTSD Action Man Child: Louis Enright Chaperone: Erika Enright Paralysed Action Man Child: Xavier Gomez Chaperone: Tracy Gomez Dead Action Man Child 1: Tylan Hernandez Chaperone: Kym Riza Dead Action Man Child 2: Gracie Jackson Chaperone: Kelly Hodges Studio: Apiary Studios Camera & Lighting Equipment: Shift 4 Thanks to Ben Griffin, Myles Payne, Vavan Bastos, Richard Ireland, 4DModelShop & Micki Pearlman.
Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
Pank You Very Much
Twins
The Gold Dust Twins, Naples, FL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
The War
"On these occasions, he experienced an ache of longing for its shattering finalities, its deafening cacophonies, the way it changed you into something that you had no idea you could become, that you had no other way to become, something that you could never let go, and it wasn’t you that was holding onto the war, it was the war that was holding onto you, and that it would never let you go." -- work-in-progress
Writing
Drone Porn
From "Toward a Drone Sexuality - Part 1: Knowledge and Consent":
"We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care…There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet."
THE LADY WHO LOVED DRONES
I talked to one of the first female Navy fighter pilots and MIT and Duke drone professor Missy Cummings for my latest post on Forbes, "Why Women Don't Support Drone Strikes":
"This country has engaged in targeted killings for a long time. Whether it’s the manned aircraft, or a sniper, or some other kind of weapon. And a UAV is just yet one more weapon in the arsenal of how we do targeted killings in this country. So I get a little concerned when people start making the technology the focus of the debate when, in fact, it’s not the technology that’s driving this, it’s the policy that’s driving this. And we need to decouple those, so that we don’t start limiting a technology that is otherwise going to revolutionize a lagging aerospace industry."