Wilmington, Washington D.C., & Charlottesville- Having early voted in NYC, I hit the road on election day to get a feel for what was going on in the rest of this vast country, well at least on the immediate eastern…
An Electoral Road Journey
Category: America
The Corona Incident
Corona- This escape from the the most dense, dithering, and deadly area hit by the pandemic came about as I pieced together imaginative fragments of mind and memory. For years I’d kept New Mexico in my back pocket as not…
Rock Me Amarillo
Amarillo- After exploring the history of terrorism in OKC and Norman, I headed for the principal city in the Texas panhandle. I didn’t plan this leg of the journey very well, or at all really. Amarillo was the last stop…
Stormin’ Norman
Norman- Heading west out of Joplin I quickly crossed into Oklahoma and towards its eponymous state capitol oft abbreviated locally as OKC. I steered straight for the city’s elegant memorial plaza commemorating those killed in the 19 April 1995 truck…
All Joplin, No Janis
Joplin- After back to back Coronas, I posted up in southwestern Missouri for a few nights to gather my thoughts before heading further south and west. My night drive from Springfield, “Queen City of the Ozarks,” was a white knuckle affair.…
Crown of the Ozarks
Corona- I departed Memphis toward West Memphis once again to find Corona, this time in southern Missouri’s green, quiet Ozarks region, A convoluted series of rural roadways led me to yet another back of beyond situated in Oregon County that…
Coronita (Little Corona)
Corona- As mentioned in the previous post, I realised it made way more sense to go to Corona, Tennessee as a stand alone day trip from Memphis mostly based on that virtually no data existed on Google about the place…
Driving in Memphis
Memphis- After the family Civil War bucket list adventure in Chattanooga, I began my westward journey in earnest. My next planned stop was Corona but I decided to cool down in Memphis for a few days after so much relentless…
From Ireland to Tennessee
Chattanooga-Ka-Bloosh and I arrived in southern Tennessee-his home state and my familial bucket list destination-without a hitch. As a child, my father told a story of a distant relative from County Cavan, then part of United Kingdom of Great Britain…
“No Mask, No Gas”
Moorestown- Finally venturing outside New York since the crisis began in earnest (which I’m dating as 16 March when at 20h (8pm) when non-essential businesses were forced to shutter) my friend and I stopped for fuel in southern New Jersey…
Travels on the Corona Highway
Corona- As the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) seemingly surged into New York City in early 2020, I began plotting an escape route knowing that my densely populated, under educated neighbourhood would be among the most vulnerable in the city, if not…
Crossroads of a Global War
Manbij- Along the Manbij Military Council’s mostly quiet frontline with the Turkish military and its Islamist Syrian Arab proxy militias, headlines have emanated from this mostly misunderstood crisis locus. One of the most crucial points which I personally found maddeningly…
The Detritus of Pain: Iraq 15 Years On
Erbil- Today marks fifteen years since the disastrous Anglo-American invasion of the Republic of Iraq. Eighteen months after the American intervention in the Afghan civil war became internationalised in response to 9/11, the next phase of what I refer to as…
Presidents
New York- The American political system was dealt what many perceived as a devastating blow last night after years of fitful yet steady progress on a host of domestic and international policy issues. From normalization of relations with Cuba to…
A Weathered #fabledcity
New York- For close to two years now I’ve been putting up ink jet analog prints up around three of New York City’s five boroughs and in my favorite locales in EU Mediterranean states as part of my #fabledcity project…
Walk It Home
New York- A couple of photos of mine from the ‘Summer War’ in 2006-era Lebanon are featured in a new documentary film on The Wanton Bishops, a Lebanese blues band that subsequently tours the heartland of the blues in the southern…
Ground Zero: My Photographs from 9/11/01 to 9/11/11
Paros- Four years ago today I finished this decade-long documentary project about what was then called ground Zero in lower Manhattan. When 9/11 took place in my city, I told myself I would follow the story wherever I could for as…
Footprints
New York- Milling around the the 9/11 memorial the other day, I looked at one random, small cluster of names engraved above on of the two massive cascading fountains where the roots of the twin towers once intertwined with the…
Twenty Years
New York- It’s such an obvious thing to say but it’s really hard to believe it’s been two solid decades since the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. I viscerally remember sitting in the dormitory at San Diego State…
It’s Morning in Iran…Maybe
New York- Regarding the planned nuclear deal to be reached by late June, Iranian President Hasan Rouhani announced “Today is a day that will remain in the historic memory of the Iranian nation.” Could a statement like this indicate the Islamic…
The Beginning or End of Iraq
New York- I’ve been delving through my archives of late in preparation for an upcoming series of television appearances the rise of dictatorships mostly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Poring over my stock from Baghdad and thinking about…
The Imperiled Fate of Historic Sites in Iraq
New York- With each coming day lately there is a new tragedy being announced by the takfiri evangelists who refer to themselves as ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic State). With a campaign noted for executions believed to be taking place in ar-Raqqah…
When an Anniversary Becomes History
Barcelona- Today is just another 9/11 anniversary it seems. On twitter, everyone is consumed by Obama’s speech last night vowing to “destroy” the so-called caliphate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The brutality of al-Qaeda has been rhetorically…
Out the Window
Barcelona- After an egregiously long sabbatical in the chunky, ‘polar vortex’ torn streets of NYC, I finally made it back across the Atlantic. I put plans for returning to Iraq’s Green Line and Ukraine’s chaotic Donbas region on hold for the…
Getting Up on the 4th of July
New York- This past Friday evening while crowds were frantically swarming toward the rapidly developing Queens waterfront for the annual fireworks display celebrating American independence, I quietly maneuvered around the outer borough’s Long Island City neighborhood doing another photo installation. I…
The Gateway
New York-The other wekend I finally got around to a rather simple task that I’d wanted to do over a decade back. Before 9/11 I had a vision of doing guerrilla art installations around New York and other major Western…
Beyond Polemics
New York-The reverberations of the misguided American policies following 9/11 paired with the continued spread of anti-authoritarian Arab salafism, South Asian Deobandism, evolving Levantine takfirism and the like amongst the global Sunni community*–both in terms of rhetoric and ground reality–are…
Threat Level: Elevated
New York- As I attempted to chronicle the major events of the first decade of the 21st Century, I scurried all over the world applying for visas through arcane processes at hard to find embassies and consulates, felt the thud of…
A (Hoped for) Peaceful Leadership Transition for Afghanistan
New York- With the partial election results from the April 5 vote trickling out from the Independent Election Commission (IEC) along Jalalabad Road on the edge of Kabul favoring Abdullah Abdullah, the world may witness the first peaceful transition of…
Degrees of Separation
New York- The Pulitzers were announced yesterday, catching me off guard as usual. I don’t follow the journalistic contest circuit as I once sort of did much earlier in my career. I read through the winners and finalists realizing I was…