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Diplomacy

DIPLOMACY
(In These Great Times Again)

Singapore. 12th June 2018. According to Billboard magazine, the video is first broadcast on large screens at the start of the press conference. Before President Trump enters the room, the assembled journalists are shown a four-minute promotional film put together by the White House in advance of the North Korea-United States summit. Trump claims to have played it already for Chairman Kim on an iPad. “I showed it to him today. Actually during the meeting, toward the end of the meeting, and I think he loved it,” he said. The video takes the form of an action movie trailer. An unseen narrator explains that only a few individuals ever get to change world history. “That could very well be the future,” President Trump adds, while North Korean premier Kim Jong-un agrees. People will think this is “a scene from a science fiction movie,” he says.

Culture

Benevolence

Precision

Fact/Fiction

FACT/FICTION
(True Story)

I remember one of those private thoughts as a stoned teenager circa 2005 that, for a few moments, seemed like a profound truth. I must’ve been on Wikipedia at the time, proving or disproving some hunch, when it occurred to me mid-fact-check that an internet connection would surely, in the not too distant future of information, make it impossible for people to lie; or that it would increase the chance of being caught out so that no sensible person would try.

Verity

Authenticity

AUTHENTICITY
(My Flamboyant Grandson)

I had brought my grandson to New York to see a show. Because what is he always doing, up here in Oneonta? Singing and dancing, sometimes to my old show-tune records, but more often than not to his favorite CD, Babar Sings!, sometimes even making up his own steps, which I do not mind, or rather I try not to mind it. Although I admit that once, coming into his room and finding him wearing a pink boa while singing, in the voice of the Old Lady, “I Have Never Met a Man Like That Elephant,” I had to walk out and give it some deep thought and prayer, as was also the case when he lumbered into the parlor during a recent church Couples Dinner, singing “Big and Slow, Yet So Very Regal,” wearing a tablecloth spray-painted gray, so as to more closely resemble Babar.

Contingency

Decline

DECLINE
(The Life and Times of a Gas Station Coffee Cup)

In happy little parabolas, a white coffee cup is bouncing along the baking asphalt of Interstate Highway #40. It is buffeted and propelled along its course by the perpetual hot wind that has been blowing in these parts for the last three weeks as the season reaches its zenith. The cup, keeping to its present trajectory, is set to cross the border into Arizona from New Mexico shortly, and if it could, it would be experiencing its final adventure; the cup’s last hurrah. Miraculously it has blown – impeded only once for a short time by a low chain-link fence surrounding a swimming pool containing no water, just dust and rubbish, other cups, etc. – all the way from the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico.

Allusion

Convergence

Narratives

Realism

REALISM
(Hope Without Optimism)

The fashion industry today is awash with good intentions. It’s ‘organic’, ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’, ‘fairtrade’ and ‘handmade’. But what good do well-intentioned swing tags do, when it remains one of the planet’s most destructive polluters, devastating natural resources, producing 10% of global carbon emissions, and filling landfill sites the world over? And if you are complicit in it – buying, wearing or desiring its output, or, moreover, working as part of the monumental machine which sells it season after season – how do you begin to address the climate crisis?

This spring, after global climate collective Extinction Rebellion staged a weeks-long protest throughout London, we met with members Clare Farrell and Sara Arnold – a designer and activist, and the founder of fashion rental company Higher Studio, respectively – to talk about the real ramifications of fast fashion, and the intersection of ambition and hypocrisy in a capitalist society. The truth is, we’re in serious trouble.

Memorial

Selfhood

SELFHOOD
Two Truths and a Lie (In No Order)

I am beautiful because my mother tells me so
I am ugly because the world tells me so
Looks are not everything

Nature

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” So opens David Wallace-Wells’ An Uninhabitable Earth, a book published by an imprint of Penguin Random House in February of this year and met, at least as I imagine it, with a slow, deep exhalation from readers the world over.