roller coaster news walk drive

now up: the next sequence of the blueprintreview identity issue. it includes a marilyn monroe story, a roller door walk, and a moment of equilibrium.

the roller door walk developed through a blog note Rose Hunter put online after she returned from a suburban photo walk. the blog note is up here: Immaculate Conceptions. i was reminded of those repetitive architecture patterns when driving through Lanzarote, and passing half-built holiday bungalows, some of them unfinished and abandoned. there even is a ghost-town-like suburb with strings of identical houses. at those edges with view to a piece of ocean, houses found owners. one thing i kept wondering about: Lanzarote's vulcanoes are still active. the last major eruptions were from 1730-1736, and in 1824, with altogether 30 vulcanoes active, and 23% of the island's surface covered with lava. i don't think there is any insurance that covers this. still, people keep builiding their houses, some directly in the lava fields.

but maybe mankind is like that. what's also unsettling: the current stream of news. maybe it affects me more after the 2 week-newsbreak. still. there's no real way to keep track of all things happening, especially not with the complex topics like the Euro-currency-instability, the Cancun climate change talks, and the consequences of both for the coming decade. those 2 themes would be more than enough to digest, yet added to that, there is the Wikileaks-revelations that from topic now get overtaken by the web-attack-discussions and Leakspin, and the daily news about Julian Assange. TMI - Too much information, Dave Bontas wrote in his blog, and i can so relate to that.

the whole situation is mirrored in the German news: there's a lot of quick daily news, but only few larger articles that try to get into those topics. one main theme of the week: the live accident of a candidate in a TV game show. another main news: the 3 tourists that got attacked by a shark in Egypt (one of them from Germany). this was headline news and kept coming up in broadcasts in 2-minute-features. also, there was a suicide bomber in Stockholm (and one in Iraq, with 40 dead, but from news sorting, this runs under the small print news messages).

meanwhile, only few news magazine actually get into the Wikileaks data and material. the one that does the most detailed job so far is Spiegel, they started an ongoing online Wikileaks feature with updates (Die Botschaftsdepeschen). they also started a leaks-database, and refer to other news websites with feature pages, especially the Guardian's embassy cables live updates blog. but just to cover the daily updates, you would need the full news time. or run a special, but the specials this week were about winter traffic problems already.

which leads to the question: who choses what is news? and on what basis - headline effect or global importance? shark attacks and celebrity divorces = main news. and: dramas with German tourists involved (be it shark attack of flight delays) = main news. even though all this is forgotten a week later. there probably are screenings of people watching news to give news editors guidelines as to how to select "attractive" news. also: news is what is in the news. if one station runs a story, other stations pick it up. and following this, it seems the news stations copy the style and content: because people like it like this.

which brings me back to the Roller Door Devotional lines, only with changed subject and pronoun:

People want it because people want it.

Broken down like this, the news makes perfect, hermetic
sense; the logic, spinning me in a vortex

What is eliminated here is mostly confined
to that which is not clean line

Where are we? And where were we,
all this time, during which things have been laid out
in slate, sea spray, evening haze?

that's what i thought about on a winter drive today.
*



in counterpart to all those world thoughts, some memories from Lanzarote.
i now started a page with photos and moments from there, so far it inlcudes 3 stories, from previous trips. while looking for fitting texts and images, i played with it, and started to move it to third person, which gives it a slightly different spin. i like how this starts to shape out: Lanzarote - island stories.