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The visual language of climate change has become predictable and stunted. In the 1980s activists used an image of a polar bear adrift on a floe of ice to tell the story of global warming and rising sea levels. It's become visual shorthand for the topic — useful for quick categorisation, but stale and easily dismissed.
Did you see the news today? Law failed love. Let love be law.
If used without thought, stock images can misrepresent and trivialise serious issues. I have the displeasure of living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a hugely misunderstood and devastating condition. When I see an article on CFS, it is almost always beneath a stock photo of somebody yawning or with head in hands. These images contribute to society's misapprehension that CFS is exclusively related to sleep, making it even tougher for patients to live in a world already hard enough to live in.
We remember that sad morning, when the bombs exploded, when the cold air, suddenly became too hot, when the flock became wild, how they ran into the wild. look! see! The vineyard is still on fire! look! see! The market stalls is still on fire! We slowly limped, towards the west we head, to where the air is still cold, to where the field is still green, towards the West, to where came the bombs, we head.
When a remote valley in the north of Iceland is struck by an outbreak of scrapie - a fatal, degenerative disease that affects sheep - Gummi, Kiddi and their farmer neighbours must face the prospect of conducting a mass slaughter. This is very much a communal crisis, and a consideration of the socioeconomic hardships of traditional Icelandic sheep farmers in modern times. But it's also a teasing-out on the personal level of Gummi and Kiddi's emotional and practical responses to this turn of events.
On a terrace just below the house is the beloved, late Ecuadorian artist Guayasamin's masterpiece, La Capillla del Hombre. A collection of his imposing artworks fills the space, works that ask the unanswerable question: why is man equally capable of such cruelty, and such compassion? It is a question that all good art should pose — a point that Australia's newly appointed Minister for the Arts would do well to remember.
There are few activities more unsettling than viewing the bodies of deceased children. But I'm not convinced that visual tokens of suffering, shared within safe, affluent settings, change much. A photo can suggest that a woman is abused by her partner and motivate people to donate money to a charity. But it won't make anybody voluntarily give up the privilege that fostered the pain.
I take a lot of selfies. Some of them are silly, coquettish, dramatic. Others are just my face looking into my computer, sitting where I work, dressed in work clothes. They mean more or less nothing. They’re just an inane collection of data on my laptop, or too easy self-portraits. Nothing means nothing, but it says something about the culture.
Judge Garry Neilson is in a spot of bother after comparing incest and paedophilia to homosexuality. He is not the first judge to find himself in this situation and he will not be the last. Judges enjoy a life of privilege and status. In their own courtroom they are feudal masters. But when one of them makes a mistake, the media jumps all over them. Politicians rant. The controversy is always out of proportion to the alleged error.
When I have achieved universal fame, they will turn my childhood house into a tourist attraction. My mum and dad's bedroom won't be of much interest to many enthusiasts, but in the lounge room, they will be excited to see the original family lounge suite. It is unlikely my Ikea bookcase will have survived, but visitors will be able to enjoy a faithful reconstruction, built by an artisan specialising in the 'Allen key' method of furniture design.
'You come from a culture where it is okay to kill children,' the Iraqi woman said. We were sheltering against the wall of a building in Fallujah while the city was under attack by US forces. What could I say? There were several little bodies at my feet, bloodied remains laid out on the footpath and covered with thin sheets.
I've never been a member of a cult, but I do have limited fringe experience of one fervent pentecostal church. The Master's portrayal of cult life chimes disturbingly with that experience. The cult members are attracted not just to the promise of meaning and belonging, but also to the eerie comfort of having someone else do their thinking.