"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
Robert Stone

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June 7, 2008

MUST-SEE SITES

CHECK IT OUT. Multimedia artist and educator Hasan Elahi was detained by authorities at the Detroit Metro airport in the months after the September 11 attacks. A Rutgers professor at the time, he was entirely innocent of any wrong-doing. But for months, the F.B.I. interrogated him, forcing him to take nine polygraph tests before they determined that he was not a threat to national security. As an obsessive counterpoint to this pointless detention and as a way of lampooning what he perceived as the government's invasion of his privacy, Elahi decided to telegraph his comings and goings in a visual biographical blog ad absurdum, informing the F.B.I. – and the rest of us – of every movement in his life, no matter how trivial. (Elahi.org is an online compilation of his work.)

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…Photo-centric site BagNewsNotes, courtesy of Michael Shaw, continues to focus inventively on visual culture.

…Tim Barber, former photo mayven at Vice, fresh from his transporting (and sometimes laugh-out-loud/smack-the-forehead brilliant) exhibition, “Various Photographs,” at the New York Photo Festival in DUMBO in May, continues to thrill visitors to his mag-photoblog-electronic-exhibition-online-gallery-melange, TinyVices.com.

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OFF-LINE…I highly recommend Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, which I read in galleys several months ago, and which has just been published by Ballantine. Authors Patrick Creed (a firefighter and historian) and Rick Newman (of U.S. News & World Report) weave a heretofore-untold tale of remarkable heroes and of unconscionable hubris (on the part of a few small-minded bit players) by splicing together first-person accounts and first-rate reporting, technical assessments and scenes of internecine squabbles and standoffs that kept various agencies from working together in the days and weeks after the assault on the Pentagon.

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And in the REAL WORLD, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has finally had his day in court, six and a half years after the attacks. And presidential hopeful John McCain, the man who may keep U.S. troops in the fertile Tigris and Euphrates unto the next millennium, has expressed his unwavering support for wiretapping-without-a-warrant. Heaven help us. I’ll take Inexperienced Barack over Big Brother the Elder, any day.

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