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Postcards From the Edge - Tocqueville's Letters Home - NYTimes.com on 2009-11-19
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Americans drink no wine but stuff themselves with stupefying amounts of food.
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He writes about dancing on the deck of Le Havre, the ship that carried him here, and crawling out on the bowsprit to watch the foam break.
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He writes one letter to his father while perched in a sycamore tree overlooking the Hudson River. In another to his brother, he asks for two dozen yellow kid gloves, because he’s been going to so many balls that he runs through a pair every two or three days.
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Tocqueville and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison system for the French government, and on their return they dutifully filed a lengthy report
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the idea that American individualism is isolating as well as liberating.
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Oddly, when Mr. Brown began to collect the letters, he discovered that the originals had vanished. They exist now only in handwritten copies, some from the 19th century and some made later at Professor Pierson’s request. “It’s just a mystery,” Mr. Brown said. “Someone is probably sitting on them somewhere, and they’re worth a fortune.”
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Once he got here, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that physical space a sense of inner space and freedom.
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Trevor Paglen on 2009-11-07
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Trevor Paglen Reveals The "Blank Spots On The Map" - The Rumpus.net on 2009-11-07
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Paglen: The Red Hats were a unit of test pilots whose job was to fly a squadron of Soviet MIGs, Russian aircraft. Since the 1960s, the United States has acquired, over time, a squadron of foreign aircraft — a secret squadron. They were based at Groom Lake in Nevada, and the pilots who flew these basically purloined MIGs called themselves the Red Hats, after the color red that’s associated with the Soviet Union. On their patch is a bear coming across the world, and the slogan is MORE WITH LESS, because they’re doing more work with less stuff — because they don’t have that many of these MIGs.
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Rumpus: It has six stars. What do those signify?
Paglen: They signify 5+1, for Area 51, which is where they’re based.
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So what can we see here (in this photo)? I see a horizon with a lot of indistinct lights on it, and some mountains in the background. You shot this from a location 26 miles away from the installation…
Paglen: On top of a mountain.
Rumpus: So what can we really see here?
Paglen: Nothing! (Laughs) And that’s one of the things that I like to do, photograph something even though there’s only so much that a photograph can tell you. That’s why I use the word limit in the name of the technique. Think about it: we’re seeing these places, but we’re also seeing the limit of seeing these places.
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What a lot of people don’t realize about the satellite imagery in general is that resolution is measured along two axes. There’s a linear resolution, which is what is the most detailed thing you can see in the photograph. But if you’re an intelligence analyst, or a spy — what’s actually more important is the temporal resolution. In other words, how quickly can you get the image? How close is the image in time to the thing that you want to see?
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Paglen: These two are airplanes; there’s another one here that is also an airplane. And this one here is a spy satellite whose name is KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL. The satellite looks like a white line interrupting the flow of stars through the sky — or disrupting it — and what that is, is the movement of this satellite over the course of the exposure. It’s a long exposure so it leaves a trail.
I’ve been photographing spy satellites in the night sky for years now, and as kind of a subset of that body of work I’ve been photographing spy satellites over iconic landscapes in the West, in places that were first photographed by 19th century photographers like Muybridge or O’Sullivan or Watkins, who were often funded by the Department of War to conduct survey missions. A lot of these 19th century photographs we think of now as art landscape photography, at the time they called it reconnaissance missions.
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With any kind of project, (artists) have to decide what level of resolution we’re going to see something in. Like a satellite: if we look further back, we can see a broader swath of land with less detail, or we can look up close and see a lot of detail, but a smaller swath of land. So this is a very broad view.
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Investigative journalists are becoming so scarce; there’s increasingly less and less funding for people to do real time-consuming, painstaking forms of research and journalism. And let’s face it, when we look at the big news stories coming out of the world of state secrets in the last eight years or so, they were pretty much all broken by people who spent years, investigative journalists who spent years working on these stories. Things like
NSA wiretapping,
CIA secret prisons. And people who are in a position to do that work are becoming rarer and rarer, and there’s less and less funding for that kind of work.
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One thing I’ve come to see in researching this is that the state is internally very inconsistent, fractured and contradictory. And when you start to see that, you take out some of the mystique and some of the fear we have about organizations that are devoted to covert activities
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the failures of oversight (of) the secret state, historically. For example — the crucial example, in fact — is the
Church and
Pike hearings of the 1970s, which I talk about a little in the book. That was a moment in history where Congress really got angry and took on covert operations in a way that was unprecedented before that, and is unprecedented since that moment. This is where things like the
Hughes-Ryan Act come out of, where Congressional committees which are ostensibly charged with oversight into covert activities come out of, this is (the reason for) laws requiring presidents to sign findings for covert activities. All of those come out of the Church and Pike hearings. But only a few years after a lot of that legislation was passed, we see the Reagan administration and
the CIA under Bill Casey figuring out all kinds of ways to undermine and to get around all of those laws. Which culminates in
the Iran-Contra affair. And the fact that nobody went to prison for Iran-Contra, nobody was really held accountable, is a hugely important moment in American history.
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Amazon.com: Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (9780525951018): Trevor Paglen: Books on 2009-11-07
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